By Charles Onyango-Obbo

More by this Author

At the start of the week, Gilbert Olanya, the Member of Parliament for Kilak South in Uganda's northern Gulu region, got into a spot of bother over charcoal. Olanya was arrested by police for allegedly inciting people to loot charcoal.

The MP and his supporters, however, probably see themselves as heroic members of an environmental liberation movement. They intercepted a truck that was carrying charcoal, seized the cargo and carried it away. Police tear gas and scuffles followed.

Olanya recently launched a campaign against the runaway illegal charcoal trade in the region, and a growing number of local and anti-charcoal vigilantes are emerging to enforce bans on the trade.

The Acholi region, where Gulu is, currently supplies a considerable chunk of the charcoal consumed in Uganda cities such as Kampala. It's a trade that touches raw nerves. Uganda has lost over a million hectares of tree cover in the past two decades — nearly a third of its total. Most of that loss happened outside the north, because the region was at war until about 17 years ago.

Tree-filled expanse

Sixteen years of war allowed the region to explode into a lush green tree-filled expanse. When the peace came, the environmental plunderers swooped in.

A ruthless network of security officials and businesspeople rumoured to reach very close to the top of Ugandan politics, has been illegally logging northern Ugandan forests and exploiting them for charcoal. The region is the heartland of the precious shea butter, which has spawned a lucrative trade. However, the shea tree is the favourite target of charcoal burners and illegal loggers.

Many people in the north are sour that after the losses of war, they are now suffering a second wave of attack on their environment.

President Yoweri Museveni and local leaders have banned the charcoal trade, but in a country with a booming population, and where only 1.7 million of about eight million households are connected to grid electricity, charcoal for cooking is too precious.

Cross-border trade

Ugandan charcoal is also in big demand in Kenya, and a lucrative legal and illegal cross-border trade in the commodity thrives.

In 2018, events in Kenya foretold the charcoal conflict scenes in Gulu this week. In what Kenyan media labelled a "charcoal war between Kiambu and Kitui counties," like MP Olanya, then-Kitui governor Charity Ngilu enforced a charcoal and sand harvesting ban in her county. Youthful militants from the area burned two vehicles ferrying charcoal.

In turn, youth from neighbouring Kiambu County, where the charcoal was headed, blocked the Nairobi-Naivasha, the main Northern Corridor road to Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and South Sudan. Their action came after transporters who ferry charcoal from northeast Kenya, where Kitui County is located, closed the road demanding the arrest of Ngilu. For good measure, the then-governor of Kiambu County, Ferdinand Waititu, sued Ngilu. A regional charcoal fight in Kenya became East African.

Diminishing environmental resources

Charcoal, however, is but only one front in the broader crisis of diminishing environmental resources in Africa.

In Nigeria in recent years, Fulani herdsmen and militants have left a trail of destruction in a conflict between pastoralists and farmers that is a fight over dwindling pasture – and water. The conflict has killed thousands.

In South Africa, as drought ravaged the country in 2017 and didn't let up recently, there was the alarm that Cape Town would run out of water.

Members of Parliament called for something unusual – the nationalisation of privately-owned dams. Apparently, South Africa has 4,000 dams, of which government owns only 350.

Water

In that sense, part of the revival of the push to seize land – most of it owned by white South Africans – and redistribute it to indigenous citizens is all about water.

A similar situation started the anti-government protests in the Oromia region of Ethiopia in 2015, in opposition to the expansion of the capital Addis Ababa into their lands and investment in agriculture and flower production. The ensuing crisis eventually led to the unprecedented resignation of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and the rise of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. It also partly informed the Tigray war.

In Kenya, since 2017, there have been a series of on-and-off "ranch invasions" in the Laikipia region by herders that has left several people dead and livestock stolen. These invasions have been part of a mini water war.

Degradation of resources

Why are we seeing these charcoal and water wars? First, the long-running degradation of resources has now reached crisis levels.

Second, because there has been progress. The stereotypical ignorant villager of years gone by is a soon-to-be-extinct species.

Because of years of free primary school education, most of the young people hanging around the village yards and small town squares have some education.

Also, FM stations are everywhere. You will be hard-put to find a place in Africa where there is no local FM station. There are small cheap FM radios that cost less than $10. And most basic phones can receive FM signals.

These rural areas that once didn't make any political demands on the government in the capital now do. They understand that someone in the big cities grows very rich when their forest is cut. And also that there will be hell to pay in the years to come. They want both their share of the cake and ecological reparations.

Twenty years ago, the people of northern Uganda were broken by war. Today, they are environmentally animated.

Welcome to the future.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans". Twitter@cobbo3