The Savannah is fast becoming Sahara.
The evidence on the face of the earth especially in the Savannah is life-threatening that we cannot pretend to be oblivious of the looming danger. Water sources are drying up, trees are dying, rains have lessened, harmattan has prolonged with severity and life is in peril. The Savannah is fast becoming Sahara
My very good friend Senyalah Castro recently reported for Atinkaonline that some vegetable farmers in Paga have
abandoned their farms because water sources are drying up faster than they anticipated.
In my village, two boreholes have dried up. Our personal water well and another one meant for a borehole have also dried up. A couple of trees including a guava tree that supplemented my feeding while growing up also died mysteriously. These are scary observations that we all must be worried about.
In the Savannah regions, it is an open secret that the harmattan gets worse by the years: the atmosphere gets drier by the years and the trade winds become stronger. By and large, the Sahara is nearing, faster than it would naturally happen.
The forest cover in the Savannah is fast running out like Usain Bolt approaching the finish line of a 100 meter race. Thanks to illegal wood logging and other forms of indiscriminate felling of trees.
Bush burning has now become an acceptable norm, a ‘convenient’ way of land preparation regardless the harm we cause the environment. These must stop. There must be a new wave, a new dawn, a realisation that our being depends on the environment hence the need to protect and not destroy it.
As a matter of urgency, we need to reignite the conversation about climate change and sustain it. We need to take it head-on, more seriously than ever before.We need to be proactive, more practical and fervent in our resolve to create a habitable environment for ourselves and posterity. We need to hit the ground running now or run out of remedies later.
It’s true that the volume of water in the country is regrettably low largely due to climate change, the reason the Ghana Water Company has commenced rationing the very thing we say is life – water. The situation in the Savannah regions is more alarming to say the least. I’m tempted to ask what the fate of a country that rations water, no, life rather, is? Rationing water invariably means rationing life. Can we stand it?
In the midst of all these, you hear more calls on government than you hear clarion calls on the masses to consert efforts to fight climate change. The situation for me is more of a climate issue than it is a governance issue and it’ll take more of human activity to solve it rather than looking up to government for some magic. Even if the government fulfills its one village one dam promise, the dams will still dry up if we don’t take climate issues seriously.
Nature may as well account for part of the phenomenon but much of it is on us. We created the situation and we can ‘uncreate’ it if we put our minds to it. Like Bola Ray puts it, it’s possible. Yes, that I very much believe.
If we must live, then climate issues must be on top of our priority list. When the Savannah becomes Sahara, ‘Southern Ghana’ will become Savannah and then………