New African Zeitgeist: Citizens Want Climate Action, Digital Age Might Be How They Get It

Joel Ralits’a straddles two worlds. To a visitor from the city, he describes himself as jobless. But as he strolls between his maize and sorghum fields high above a whiplash bend in the Makhaleng River gorge, near the Malealea village in Lesotho, about 80 kilometres south of capital Maseru, it’s clear that he’s kept busy in the way that farming demands. Hand-tilled fields don’t bend the knee to the office hours or work weeks that govern office folks’ lives. 

These are the same fields his grandfather tilled, and which have been handed down the family line in accordance with customary practice, writes Leonie Joubert for Daily Maverick.

Right now, he is on the clock. The 30-year-old takes on occasional gigs as a tour guide, accompanying guests from a nearby lodge to the gorge’s storied rock paintings and waterfall. The work is sporadic and doesn’t pay well, but it puts a bit of cash in his pocket. 

Today’s tour is different. After an hour-long slog beneath the midday February sun, he pauses on a roughly bulldozed access road that ends at a precipitous drop into the gorge. He pulls back a shrub to reveal a sunken cement block, its square top just proud of the ground. Whoever scratched a code and date into the setting concrete wasn’t concerned with neat writing, but it was done on “30/09/23”. The block’s significance is greater than its size, for it may be a Rubicon moment for the families dotted along the shoulder of the gorge in thatch- and iron-roofed homesteads.

This is the anchor point for a dam wall that the community has long known might be built in the path of the river. There are a few red-tape steps before any sod turning can happen, but if the long-anticipated project gets the go-ahead, it’s a fait accompli: the gorge will flood and Ralits’a, his ageing parents and the entire village will have to move.

Where to? No idea. When? Don’t know. How much say will they have in the process? Unclear. 

Ralits’a whips out his smartphone. The device is slim, and by the state of its screen protector, it’s been around the block. The edges are chipped and dust has collected in places in the way that a fingernail gathers soil after a good gardening session. Without much face-to-face consultation with the Lesotho government and officials from the Orange-Senqu River Commission who are responsible for this development, the internet is the first and last port of call, allowing Ralits’a to be part of the democratic processes that should govern big infrastructure builds in any African country.

New research into Africans’ attitudes towards climate collapse, and who needs to act to address it, shows that access to new forms of media is central to educating people and mobilizing the continent to leverage its power to demand action on climate change.

The pocket-sized device that delivers information into the palm of Ralits’a’s hand, a device taken for granted by people living closer to the arteries of information exchange, is a golden tether to an information stream that is the oxygen that allows a healthy democracy to breathe. 

Active Citizenry Can Stir Up Climate-Engaged African Governments  

Ralits’a straddles two worlds—the old ways of his grandfather and the new ways of devices and connectivity in a hyperconnected information age—while his country straddles a development threshold.

Water is one of Lesotho’s most important exports. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) is a network of mega-dams that brings in about 10% of the country’s gross domestic product through selling its “white gold” to Southern African Development Community (SADC) partners. Many SADC countries are already dramatically water-scarce and will get more so as parts of the subcontinent warm and dry, and are hit by increasingly severe multiyear droughts such as the 2015-to-2021 event that had devastating consequences. 

At the same time there are questions about how much of this export income makes it down to the villagers on the ground, including those who have been relocated to make way for these kinds of mega-developments, according to social scientist Dr Teboho Mosuoe-Tsietsi, whose doctoral research focused on communities forced to relocate when the Mohale Dam, about 65-km east of Maseru, was added to the LHWP expansion. This is in a country where about 60% of rural families live below the poverty line and are falling behind their urban counterparts in terms of income and job prospects. 

Mosuoe-Tsietsi’s time with the relocated Mohale Dam families shows that there needs to be “exhaustive measures of accountability” if those forced to resettle are to be protected from unintended consequences of what is inevitably an unequal power dynamic in such developmental decision-making.

Africans Want Climate Action—New Research Shows How To Mobilize It

In this challenging development context, Africans know that action is needed on climate and expect their governments to lead the charge, according to a recent continent-wide study.

The survey, by the nonprofit Afrobarometer, asked rural and urban people across 39 countries who they thought should lead climate action: their governments, ordinary citizens or countries and industries who are historically the biggest polluters.

Most respondents said they place this responsibility on their own governments. Very few said historic emitters should be accountable for action, in spite of these being responsible for most of the pollution causing the societal, economic and environmental damage linked with climate instability, to which Africa is most vulnerable. 

This suggests a gap in climate literacy but also points to an opportunity for increased engagement, according to Dr Nick Simpson, chief research officer at the Climate Risk Lab in the University of Cape Town’s African Climate and Development Initiative. 

Those who had access to climate information through the internet via platforms such as a computer or smartphone, WhatsApp or social media were more likely to point the finger at historic Global North polluters and industries in terms of responsibly to act. 

“There is a strong correlation between access to new media types that shifted the dial for attributing responsibility to historical emitters.”

This emerging zeitgeist can be a “wake-up call” for governments in terms of their stepping up to citizens’ expectations for them to take the lead, particularly in North-South negotiations aimed at raising funds to pay for the losses and damages suffered on the continent. 

“It could be leveraged for greater responsiveness by African governments, particularly for adaptation to climate change,” says Simpson, who co-wrote a recent review of the survey’s findings. 

Off The Beaten Track—Hyperconnected 

On the way back through his village, Ralits’a points to a two-wheeled cart that was once fire-engine red but now dulled from age and sun exposure. The letters MNR are hand-painted in a squiggly white. If he wants to get his elderly parents to hospital, he says, picking up the tow-hitch, it means hauling them off in a donkey cart like this, phoning around to find a charitable neighbour with an off-road vehicle to meet them at the nearest road and bouncing over the appalling dirt tracks before they can reach asphalt and a town. 

It could take hours, he says. 

And yet information can reach here in seconds, if someone has a phone and money to buy data. 

If the Makhaleng River dam goes ahead, Ralits’a and his neighbours will have to abandon their fields and the inheritance these small patches of earth represent. They’ll leave behind the gravesites where their forebears rest. They’ll probably lose the social threads that kept neighbours neighbourly for generations. They won’t have a say in the move – it will be a forced relocation – but they are supposed to have a say in where they move to and what compensation they receive on the other side. 

But Ralits’a hasn’t been able to get clarity from his government or the Orange-Senqu River Commission about what comes next, or when. He seems exasperated and determined in equal measure, though, and prepared to put the thumbscrews on to anyone who might have some answers. Without the phone in his pocket, though, his best efforts would probably be dead in the water.

Cover photo:  Mountains across the Makhaleng River, Lesotho (Moeketsi Majoro/flickr)