“Finance has gone farming,” argues Stefan Ouma in his brilliant ethnographic analysis of case studies from New Zealand and Tanzania. He asks, which form of finance for which kind of food future? A question we reiterate somewhere else, albeit in a slightly different way: Which Bio_economy for what Kind of Future?

These are pertinent questions given that we are facing a climate breakdown, which is not just an environmental issue, but indeed an existential crisis. After wars over gold, diamonds, and oil, future wars will be (and already are) fought over food and water, unless humans are sensible enough to avoid the looming climate catastrophe. Meanwhile, the financialization of food, agriculture, climate (mitigation and adaptation), and nature seriously militate against our ability to make sense of current realities.

In the wake of the global food, fuel, and financial crises of 2007/08, the Global South experienced unprecedented race for farmland dubbed the “global land rush”. This rush prompted land grabbing by an unusual and heterogeneous group of actors – including foreign governments, private corporations, and institutional investors. Approximately 56 million hectares of farmland were acquired, of which 70%  were reportedly concentrated in ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’.

In a recent editorial of the African Studies Review Journal, “Understanding Land Deals in Limbo in Africa”, Youjin Chung and Marie Gagne posit that numerous large-scale land deals projects speculatively initiated within the last two decades, especially in ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, remain stalled, partially operational, abandoned, or speculative to date. The likes of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) and the New Alliance for Food Security (NAFS) faced the same fate. Mind you, these were the green economy flagship projects imposed by political and financial oligarchies.

We know the levels of violence and dispossession these massive projects fostered in rural Africa in general and in Tanzania in particular. So, their (natural or planned) death gave us a sigh of relief. But what will transpire in the post-COP26 world?

Blame it on Pastoralists
After the Glasgow climate summit – COP26 – issues of sustainability will likely dominate the public discourse in one way or another. Since no political consensus on the  key issues has been reached, some people somewhere will be scapegoated to compensate for that failure. Either with their land, water, taxes, or their very dear lives, they will be made to pay for the failures and irresponsible lifestyles of others. So, beware of false prophets, who come to you in sustainability’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous (mis)leaders (read dealers).

Water and electricity rationing is ongoing in Dar es Salaam due to decrease in water levels in Upper Ruvu and Wami River. The Dar es Salaam Water and Sewage Authority (DAWASA) announced that water pressure has decreased by 12%. On November 18, 2021, the state-owned national power company (TANESCO) announced that production deficit of approximately 345MW, which is equivalent to 21% of total production. Because of that, there is panic in the ‘real’ country’s capital (Dar).

Stocking water, an unfamiliar practice for some residents of this city (the privileged ones), is becoming a norm. Others are kindly advising that we only drink bottled water this time for safety concerns. Who can afford that? This is of course another question. It is an important question especially for the city’s surplus population (toilers) not to mention majority of rural folks to whom scarcity is rather a daily reality.

The government has not been quiet. It has always been quick to respond to these scarcities and assure the public that, with ‘good management’, things will be in order. On November 15, 2021, the Prime Minister (PM), Kassim Majaliwa Kassim visited the Lower and Upper Ruvu Basin Development Authorities responsible for water supply mainly for the City of Dar es Salaam and the Coast Region. In his discursive address, based on a  short site observation and the briefings he received from responsible authorities, he acknowledged, though in passing, that climate change is the reason for the decrease of water in the basin. However, he dwelt on those deemed perpetrators of environmental damage and mounting water scarcity, urging the authorities to put on “boots and combat” to save lives!

It is appropriate to quote him – by way of translation – at length:

I have received basic information [about] climate change, but I have also seen a video – our video shows a large number of pastoralists there in the water sources that feed the Ruvu River… and you the basin authority are there, and you do have the law with you. We will be causing death to [many] people. Honorable Minister of Livestock, are you there? The number of livestock is very high and uncoordinated. We need to have livestock, but it must be coordinated. It has not been coordinated yet. Ruvu is the life of coastal people and residents of Dar es Salaam. Therefore, if we do not enforce the law, we will be causing the death of people. [You] Ministry of Livestock, go and talk to these pastoralists. One man has 1000 cows, and another and another, how can we not dig a 100-meter borehole and make our own pond and watering bowl. We have not set this procedure for them. These fellow pastoralists are at least capable: one cow can be sold for up to 150,000 shillings [$ 65] and sometimes they are just slaughtered for ceremonial purposes. Now, the cow that would be slaughtered for the festival should be sold for money so that we could dig a borehole. We will get plenty of water. We have not sat down with them and educate them and guide them in those decisions. Now when we send 1000 cows to one area, fine, how many cows would have gone into this river…we will be causing the death of people. We must act; our laws must be enforced. And education must go to them: I know they will complain, but we must tell each other the truth because we will be causing the death of more people than one person with 1000 cows. We need cattle but the system must be well organized. I see you Minister of Livestock, deal with that. Sit together [to discuss] with the Ministry of Water, Ministry of Livestock, and Ministry of Natural Resources. There are many places Her Excellency President Samia Suluhu Hassan has allowed to be used for social activities – let’s take them there. The Ruvu River remains for the waters of the people of Dar es Salaam and the Coast Region.

While listening to the PM, his panic, alarming vilification of pastoralists, and misplaced sense of urgency, I could not help but think of William Ryan’s beautiful book Blaming the Victim. Ryan shows how the needy, poor, and powerless are regularly characterized, stereotypically, as being lazy, ignorant, or even stupid and that their sorry conditions are their fault. Ubishi na Ukaidi (controversy and stubbornness), not rationality, describes them best as President Samia Suluhu Hassan told us recently when addressing the same issue of water shortages.

It is morally wrong and indeed cruel that those far less responsible for global warming bear, not only the brunt of its costs, but also added victimization from those in privileged positions. What message exactly is the PM sending across? What is he telling the frightened public regarding water and power deficits that will likely affect the economy and their livelihoods?

He is telling them don’t blame the government, blame pastoralists, ostensibly because:

  • Their irrational drive to accumulate thousands of cattle, which are not economical anyway (‘only serve ceremonial purposes’) is the reason for water shortage!
  • Their mobile (uncoordinated) lifestyle is a mess and we (‘the enlightened’) need to help settle (modernize) them in order to save the environment and ourselves!
  • ‘Education’ is important to help these primitive pastoralists know the modern ways of doing the economy and being with nature!
  • But we should not rely very much on education, we have the laws that regulate the resource use, those laws must be enforced now (urgency)!
  • “I know they will complain” because we will use violence, but you, the public, must empathize with us (the government) because we are doing it for the good of the greatest number!

In less than a week following the PM’s speech authorities reported that water volume in Ruvu river has increased from 0.2 to 0.6 metres after eviction of ‘invaders’. However, irrigation, not pastoralists, now features out more prominently as the cause of water shortage as per authorities’ reports. For instance, the Wami/Ruvu Basin Water Board reported that they have arrested one investor conducting irrigation agriculture in a 50 hectares farm in Kidogozelo Village, Chalinze District. According to the Water Board, the arrested investor, a Chinese national, pumps water from the source of Ruvu river using a water pump with pumping capacity of one million liters per hour.

A Better Life for Every Pastoralist
Prejudices and marginalization of pastoralists are not new in this country (see here ). What is so worrying is a constant association of pastoralists’ existence with the death of others and threatening survival of future generations. This discursive representation of pastoralists is meant to create a particular narrative that serve to justify state’s violence against pastoralists.

Ironically, a man who once promised “A Better Life for Every Tanzanian” ended up delivering the worst for the pastoral people for entire ten years of his presidency: dispossession, displacement, murder, imprisonment, and other forms of human rights violations. Pastoralists could not believe when their beloved charismatic President told the National Assembly on November 30, 2005, that ‘we’ cannot move forward with nomadic pastoralism in the 21st century. He would later insist that he would take, which he did, unpopular steps on pastoralists to protect the environment for the benefit of the nation and future generations.

During the violent evictions of pastoralists in 2006/07, President Jakaya Kikwete remarked that, “it is better for a few pastoralists to be angry but protect the lives of the next generation”.

These frightening words from the then Head of State who was also a Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces were uttered in early 2006. I was then a secondary school student and that very day two friends and I went to search for water from a borehole that was a few kilometres away from our school. I listened to President Kikwete’s speech from a radio owned by a security guard that was taking care of the borehole. I was frightened that the President thought we (pastoralists) are the threat to the next generations. Shockingly, in the same line of thinking, the current PM thinks that the existence of pastoralists means death for others.

The year 2005 was the warmest year on record since the late 1880s, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) climatologists. The impact was clearly felt in Tanzania. When electricity shortages and rationing started TANESCO put the blame on the continuing drying-up of the Great Ruaha. This became a matter of national concern that ended up taking down prominent politicians in President Kikwete’s cabinet, including the then Prime Minister Edward Lowassa.

Increasing government concern over power shortages culminated in the mass expulsion in 2006/07 of Maasai, Datoga/Barbaig, Sukuma and Tatoga pastoralists and their cattle from Usangu-Ihefu wetlands and Mbarali District in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. Other indigenous communities such as Hunter-Gatherers like the Hadzabe and Dorobo were also affected by the nation-wide violent operation that aimed to protect the environment by harshly removing those who have always been custodians of the same. This was the largest eviction of its kind in recent Tanzanian history.

The foregoing analysis makes it clear that laying blame on pastoralists for the effects of climate change is nothing new in modern Tanzania.

Frantz Fanon’s diagnosis of the nature and calibre of the under-developed country’s elites is profound and equally prophetic in every sense of the word:

It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps. National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been… This traditional weakness, which is almost congenital to the national consciousness of under-developed countries, is not solely the result of the mutilation of the colonized people by the colonial regime. It is also the result of the intellectual laziness of the national middle class, of its spiritual penury, and of the profoundly cosmopolitan mould that its mind is set in.

The problem Fanon originally analysed in 1963 remains today, six decades later. We are yet to decolonize the mind and the imaginary! That short-lived visionary, liberatory, and emancipatory humanistic Africa of the revolutionary 1960/70s that tried to respond to Fanon’s clarion call of inventing new humanity is no more. For today’s elites, it is more comforting to see bad environmental outcomes as resulting from bad agents. The bad agents are, of course, pastoralists, and not those world-class polluters! Their cowardice, intellectual laziness and colonized minds deter them from confronting systemic injustices and the civilisation of death (capitalist modernity) that is threatening human and planetary wellbeing.

It was at least comforting listening to Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados addressing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC):

When will we, as world leaders across the world, address the pressing issues that are truly causing our people angst and worry, whether it is climate or whether it is vaccines? Simply put when will leaders lead? How many more voices and how many more pictures of people must we see on these screens without being able to move or are we so blinded and hardened that we can no longer appreciate the cries of humanity? …Do some leaders in this world believe that they can survive and thrive on their own? Have they not learned from the pandemic? Can there be peace and prosperity if one third of the world literally prospers and the other two thirds live under siege and face calamity threat to our being? A 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperature would be a “death sentence” for island and coastal communities. If our existence is to mean anything, then we must act in the interests of all of our people who are depending on us. And if we don’t, we will allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of our common destruction.

Seeing things clearly helps leaders reorient their policies, exercise their agency and urgency appropriately.Ongoing violence against the urban  and rural  poor in Tanzania is an absurd irony. While the state is keeping itself busy soliciting loans to salvage capital from the debilitating hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is at the same time unleashing violence on the downtrodden. This is morally wrong and unjust.

The path of greed and selfishness of today’s rich countries has brought us erratic rains, floods, droughts, and its associated scarcities as well as sea level rising. Greed-driven production and consumption in these countries contribute 92% of global carbon emissions. This is not a path to tread (see here). Instead, we should envision other worlds which are more humane and ecologically just.

Fortunately, those worlds exist if only we are willing to see or acknowledge them. These are the worlds that are constantly suppressed, marginalized, or criminalized. Shall we be humble enough to consider the wisdom of healers and authentic ecological doctors?

Pastoralists as Ecological Doctors
Scientific evidence refutes misplaced allegations and unfounded fears of seeing pastoralists as perpetrators of environmental damage. In pastoral systems, sustainability is a legacy before it is a goal. A joint study by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), “Pastoralism and the Green Economy –a natural nexus?”  , concludes that mobile pastoralism is “one of the most sustainable food systems on the planet and delivers a wide range of economic values”. This position is supported by a recent study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which makes clear how pastoralism, by farming with nature, can address the global challenge of producing food sustainably in a context of increasing variability from climate change.

In their book Maasailand Ecology, Homewood and Rodgers state that their research was expected to provide evidence to justify a plan to evict indigenous pastoralists from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). Contrary to the expectations of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)-funded program, the results of the study showed that restrictions placed on the Maasai pastoralists throughout the NCA were not only leading to increased poverty among the pastoralists, but also to the many ecological changes occurring in the area. These researchers pointed out that the ban on grazing and the use of fire by pastoralists to control grass quality is the reason for the spread of invasive species. In fact, the only evidence of degradation of the environment in the NCA is in the crater where the pastoralists have not lived for decades now.

A similar study conducted in West Africa validates the findings of the Maasailand Ecology by showing that grazing does not damage plant communities‘ diversity. It concludes that highly grazed sites in the study area had more species diversity than lowly grazed sites. With their traditional ecological knowledges, practices, and values, pastoralists have been critical caretakers of biodiversity for thousands of years. Today, indigenous communities safeguard 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity, thereby playing a key role in climate protection.

These areas are major carbon sinks. Yet, generally, pastoralists do not feature in national plans for climate mitigation and adaptation i.e., payments for ecosystem services. In her speech at the recent UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC-COP26), President Samia called for an urgent unlocking of climate financing to help poor countries like hers manage the increasing impacts of climate change on their citizens’ lives. Yet, back home, the worst affected are told to dig boreholes for themselves and their thirsty cattle that are supposedly ‘drying’ our rivers.

The government should, first, know that shifting the blame to pastoralists is not going to solve systemic problems. Second, ongoing disregard of the vital contributions of pastoralists to biodiversity conservation and sustainable resource use is a missed opportunity. Given the fact that the climate breakdown is threating the integrity of life supporting systems, the only viable alternative way possible is making peace with nature. The so-called modern systems, be it technologies, market economies (dictatorship of markets), and the culture of consumerism and commodification have brought us to the catastrophe we are in.

The future is pastoralist. By this, I mean that values of solidarity, simplicity, care, sharing, cooperation not competition, and putting wellbeing/wholeness before the reductionist economic growth nonsense. Pastoralists know how.

Mutual coexistence with wildlife and the natural environment is a well-known conservation practice of the pastoralists. They are ecological doctors: they provide solutions not pollution.