Somaliland is dying a slow, suffocating death. It is not being killed by disease, hunger or drugs although all three are doing their best to hasten the place’s inevitable demise. It is not being taken over by an alien race or swallowed up by predatory neighbors. There is no debilitating civil war ravaging the nation although its politicians sometimes seem hellbent on starting one.
This little wannabe-nation is committing suicide. Its chosen method does not kill outright like a shot in the head. It kills slowly, painfully, hellishly. Its weapons come in the form of floods, heat, dust and biblical pestilence. The killer is the humble charcoal.
The death route Somaliland has embarked on is remarkable in its simplicity. Growing population requires fuel for cooking so trees has to be burnt to produce charcoal.
Till very recently most of the country’s 3.5 million people were nomads who constantly moved their herds of camels, sheep and goats from one area to another in search of pasture and water. They had an unwritten covenant with their harsh environment. They did not cut a living tree or burnt a thorny bush. They never stayed too long in one are lest they harm the land. Nomads moving from what appeared to be a lush pastoral land and walking for days before setting up camp again long puzzled the unknowing observer. But there was a good reason for every move. They knew their very existence depended on it. If they overstayed in one grazing area their animals would pull out the roots of the grasses, eat the seeds and disturb the fragile topsoil making it difficult for the land to replenish itself when the next desert rains come.
As a result of the nomad’s serene harmony with his environment this desert land once supported a huge variety of wildlife breathtaking in its beauty and majesty. Elephants roamed near Hargeysa till the turn of the 20th century. The dark nights of the desert rumbled with the roar of thousand lions. Herds of the most graceful gazelles on god’s earth glided over undulating grasslands from the plains of Zeila to the mountains of the Sanag. Birds of every color and hue filled the skies and nested on every sacred acacia tree. Even the names we still use today hark back to bygone era of our wildlife heritage: Giraffe Plains, Elephant Valley; Lion’s Stream.
Anyone who ever spent a night in Somaliland’s desert in the 70s would recall with fondness the sheer, deafening cacophony of noise as life burst into an awe-inspiring, heart-stopping fury of song and sound.
The desert nights are now deathly silent. Our children will never hear the rumble of a lion; the haunting call of the Somali buzzard or see the majestic flight of a kestrel as it swooped on its prey from clear, blue skies.
The culprit is urbanization. As towns grew they devoured more and more charcoal. Companies were set up to meet the voracious demand. Trees of all ages were burnt to the ground on an industrial scale. As the land degraded it could no longer sustain the nomads who then moved to the city slums adding to the demand. The country took the fast lane to environmental perdition.
Somaliland now suffers from huge dust storms that last for days. Wadis that used to run for few weeks a year in a slow, life-giving flows now flood furiously for few hours a year causing immense destruction before falling silent again. The only birds in the skies are the vultures feasting on the carcasses of starved animals. Plagues of locusts are a constant threat as the birds and insects that used to feed on them as hoppers disappear from the food chain.
Yet, remarkably, Somaliland could still salvage itself. The cure is simple and affordable: the introduction of gas. Somaliland has its own gas but no one is going to invest in digging it out of the ground until the country is recognized. But gas could be imported from the nearby Gulf region. Restaurants in towns and cities could be forced to use subsidized gas. The Aid agencies who now feed the starving nomads could help them go back to their lands by asking our Qatari or Emirati brothers to supply the country with subsidized gas for few years. There are signs that a growing number of Arab aid agencies are keen to help. The UAE Red Crescent is heavily involved in supplying food aid to Somaliland’s poor and I am confident they will be more than happy to help with this life-saving project if asked by influential NGOs like Oxfam or CARE or UNHABITAT, all of whom already work there.
The navel-gazing, selfish political leaders should wake up and smell the rot instead of playing their silly, bickering political games. They should introduce national emergency laws forcing all restaurants to convert from charcoal to gas within three months or be shut down. The whole project will probably cost no more than $ 7 Million over ten years yet it could save a whole country from certain death.
But I suspect nothing will be done. No Aid agency could be seen `promoting’ the use of fossil fuel even under these existential circumstances. No politician in Somaliland has the intelligence, will or courage to stand up and be counted. All they want is to bicker and quarrel over who takes which pointless post in their soon to die non-country. Talk of fiddling while Rome burnt.
So more living trees will turn to cinder and more nomads will move to the slums in a suicidal vortex of death and misery. This is indeed the road to perdition. The Wrath of God hath landed upon our unthinking heads.
calidheere@aol.co.uk
 

Home | Contact us | Links | Archives | Search