Mzoo Spot

Conference of the Parties (COP)17 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took place between 28 November to 11 December in Durban, South Africa. This conference went into extra time by almost 2 days, following inability by parties to reach a consensus. Eventually parties agreed to the Durban Platform, that is summarized here . Our visit to COP17 was mainly to follow local government side events. These were organized by SALGA, SA Cities Network and ICLEI. The big event for municipalities was the Local Government Convention held at the City Hall between 2 - 4 Dec. The highlight of this Convention was the signing of the Adaptation Charter by well over 100 Mayors present. It is heartening to note that most of the Mayors present were mostly from South Africa. Before going to COP17, I had only visited Durban once on a frivolous jaunt with a friend a few years ago. He had just bought a new car, and wanted a long drive to enjoy his new machine. The weather ...

Somebody said that Fela's colourful,but troubled life shadowed his music. In this authorized biography, Fela - This Bitch of A Life, Carlos Moore documents Fela in his unadulterated form. The book is in first person singular, as if Fela himself wrote it. Fela Anikulapo-Ransome Kuti was born on 15 October 1938, in Abeokuta, Nigeria to middle class parents. His father Reverend I.O. Ransome-Kuti was a man of the cloth, and his mother Funmilayo was a woman's lib activist. What is quite clear is that Fela was not always radical. He started out as jazz artist following his music education in the UK. His parents wanted him to become a medical doctor,but he chose music. It was after he met an African-American lady, Sandra Smith, who was a radical Black Panther activist that Fela started to gain African consciousness. Sandra would help Fela and his band, Koola Lobitos during difficult times in the US. During this time Nigeria was under military junta of Olusegun Obasanjo. Fela's...

A detailed account of my 2005 visit to Kenya was never published, and its draft was unfortunately lost when two of my laptops were stolen on separate occasions. This is an attempt to document that very memorable trip. In what seemed like a random act from my boss’ side, I was selected to attend a Statistics in Applied Climatology (SIAC) course in Nairobi, Kenya. I was naturally excited as this was going to be my first time visit to a country very far outside the borders of South Africa. This meant having to apply for an official visa, getting the mandatory yellow fever vaccination, and packing malaria tablets. South Africans staying for a month in Kenya did not need a visa, but we did it anyway. Our travel agent booked us (my colleague and I) on Kenya Airways (KA). Things started on a bad note when a serious fault was spotted (hydraulic pump, or something like that malfunctioned), as we were about to depart. Technicians were summoned, but they would take the whole day to fix ...

Out of the blue I decided I should write about the time I spent at Soweto-on-Sea, Port Elizabeth, between 1991-1992. After spending just a year (1990) at Nomzamo High School in Port Alfred I decided to go and study in PE. It is not quite clear to me now as to why I took this decision, but part of it was motivated by two things: the fact that Nomzamo High was a school in shambles, and that my sister had completed her high school in PE a few years earlier. After passing my standard six, I moved to PE with a hope of getting a place at Kwazakhele High School, my sister school. I was going to live with relatives in Soweto. Soweto of 1991 was a particularly bad place. The place had no infrastructure to speak of; no sanitation; no real roads; no real houses; no schools; it was simply a dump of a place. Yet, Soweto was brimming with life. I was an active soccer player then, I joined Sea Robbers Football Club. So passionate were its fans, that they even placed a boulder at the area's popula...

Thomas Sankara was born on 21 Dec 1949, in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). His parents wanted him to be a Catholic priest, but young Thomas was interested in playing guitar and motorcycles. He was a member of a jazz band called Tout-a-Coup Jazz. In 1966 after completing his high school, he started a career in the military. He pursued his further studies in the military in Madagascar in the 1970s, and it is here that he was introduced to Marxism. It is clear that Sankara was a disciplined soldier, because at the age of 27 he was promoted to be commander of a training unit,and it is during this time that time that he became friends with Blaise Compaore (current president of Burkina Faso). Sankara later gained prominence as a military leader during a border conflict with Mali in December 1974 and January 1975. From the beginning, Sankara was ceased with the task of rooting out corruption, which reared its ugly head shortly after Burkina Faso gained its independence from French rule. At...

I left OR Tambo on Thursday night, 10th February, late already for a seminar on Climate Change Adaptation Financing, which was planned to kick off that very evening. My itinerary dictated that I needed to jump off in Munich and then later, about 30 minutes, hop on another plane that will take me to Cologne/Bonn. But our flight from OR Tambo was delayed by about an hour. That meant I was obviously going to miss my connecting flight, and I did. This was not be a train smash, because I was able to get another flight with ease. When I arrived in Cologne/Bonn, Ruediger from ICLEI (the institution that invited me) was there waiting for me. When I arrived in the seminar, it was in fact time to make my presentation, but the facilitator Jeb Brugmann quite correctly felt that I needed to settle down and have a feel of discussions first. The discussions were quite rich, focusing on how best to finance or invest in climate change adaptation projects. We discussed until about 6:30pm. By this time,...

Floods in general are not uncommon in South Africa. Recent flooding events do not come near some of the past events, both in strength and the trail of disaster they left behind. South Africa has a long record of flooding events dating back to the 1800s. Sporadic though these records are, they nonetheless give us a glimpse of what happened in the past. This past is very important to anchor our present day discussions, especially in the light of climate change. The first recorded flood event in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) was in April 1856, where 686mm of rainfall were reported. It was in September 1987, however that KZN experienced what is considered to be South Africa's greatest natural disaster in terms of lives lost and damage to infrastructure. During this disaster, 506 people lost their lives and approximately 60 000 people were affected one way or another. A few years earlier KZN was devastated by Tropical Cyclone Damoina. On January 1984 Damoina formed in the Indian Ocean to the east...

Nomzamo High School in Port Alfred is the first senior secondary school in the township, and therefore a lot is expected out of it. It is with great pain now to see this school taking a serious turn to the worst. Take for instance the recent matric results,in this school 43 students wrote matric exams, but only 13 managed to pass (2 of these managed a university entrance pass). Just across the road, Kuyasa Combined School achieved a splendid 70.5 % matric pass rate. Both schools receive their students from the same community, and therefore it can be argued that these students live in similar socio-economic conditions. What this proves is that teachers at Nomzamo are failing the students.