By

F.C. OWEYEGHA- AFUNADUULA

Website: http://www.afuna.org or http://www.afuna.o-f.com

Email:afunaduula2000@yahoo.co.uk or afunaduula@afuna.org

Tel: +256 78 555 222 or +256 71 845461

 

Introduction

Environmental conservation has been hailed as one of the major contributions of the United States to World Reform Movements in that its ideas, based on the ‘National Park’ concept, were eventually exported to Britain and elsewhere. Britain was the conduit for these ideas to reach Africa.

The prevailing conservation and development philosophies and policies in Africa reflect the culture and thinking of the Western world (Anderson and Grove, 1987; Parker, 1972; 1982), ignore the broader social and political implications they embody (Areola, 1987) and deny or suppress value considerations. For example, the environmental conservation blueprint, World Conservation Strategy (1980), completely avoided any mention of any social and political dimensions of conservation (Boyd, 1984). Consequently, little attention has been paid to indigenous conservation and development innovation, creativity and initiatives (Richards, 1985).

Western conservation and economic development strategies are likely to continue to permeate the African environment well into the 21st century. This will be achieved through the education (or condition) of Africans into accepting Western economic and conservation philosophy and laying greater stress upon the economic value of natural resources at the expense of social-cultural values or costs of natural resources conservation. One school of thought in Africa believes that recent ideas emanating from the

West, such as Our Common Future, Our Common Heritage, North-South Survival, Global 2000, Structural Adjustment Programme, and the National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP) process, reflect enhanced geo-politico-socio-economic strategies of environmental domination and access to the resources of the gene-rich countries of the South (Altieri, 1989).
In Africa, environmental and development policies show strong continuity between those of the colonial state and the independence government. The policies have not only been economically, socially and politically unsuccessful; they have also been harmful to the natural environment, and thereby to the prospects of human bio-cultural diversity and survival in the long-term.

It is a fact that in Africa the greatest ecological damage has come about through Western-oriented education, industry and monocultures, all of which have a bearing on the present state of poverty in the country. Orthodox politics, which has encouraged the maintenance of a materialistically acquisitive and epicurean political culture and process, is to blame.

The idea of environmental conservation

Today, we have a global environmental conservation movement and, in some countries, national environmental conservation movements exist (Lowe and Goyder, 1983). The movement is rated among the new social movements (Hornstein, 1985) and political movements (Lowe and Goyder, 1983). It has evolved its own advocacy (Crowford and Bunyan, 1980) and diplomacy (Moore, 1985). Although it lacks the coherence of an ideology, the movement sets environmentalists apart from mainstream political culture and process in all countries (Rosenbaum, 1991).

In its cultural stance, the movement criticises market-place economics generally and the materialistically acquisitive and epicurean culture, unrestrained technological optimism and the political structures supporting them.
Today, there is such a thing as conservation politics for a new environmental era. This emphasises the importance of participatory democracy, decentralised political power, grassroot base for political advocacy, public involvement in the design and implementation of environmental regulations at all levels of government, and a reordering of cultural values (Rosenbaum, 1991). Social, economic and political dimensions of environmental conservation are thus very much alive and require consideration everywhere, every time.

Environmental conservation, however, means different things to different people and from time to time (Ratcliffe, 1976). It has become increasingly clear that the concept is nothing but an exercise in intercultural persuasion. Unfortunately, it has assumed an up-bottom orientation (Parker, 1972) with an essentially urban leadership. It has also become a personal belief, or even a religion, for many laymen who have detected personal (or socio-economic and political) survival in it, and now provide the bulk of its leadership in many countries. The idea has even been associated with political and emotional overtones, with some political regimes using it as a political weapon for acceptance in the community of civilised nations while doing actually little to conserve, or as a means to divert attention from such problems as poverty, ignorance, illiteracy and backwardness that have yet to be tackled effectively.

Past environmental conservation in Africa

Exclusion or social control of the people was a pragmatic guiding principle, if not the original motivation, of conservation policies. In essence, conservation policies were alienation policies. Most were evolved in total ignorance of the long-established ways in which Africans had ensured their own survival and that of the soils, plants and the creatures that they need in order to survive (Richards, 1985). Many of the prescriptions for environmental management, and for conservation in particular, proved hazardous for the people and wildlife. People were separated from their land by inappropriate technology and the establishment of national parks and other reserves; and women from control over household resources. Cultural practices that evolved to sustain production and the environment were lost. For example, political and economic thinking about pastoralists frequently regarded them as obstacles to the development process and contemporary perceptions of the aims of modernisation (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 1992). Pastoralists were also regarded as wasteful of available resources regardless of the fact that such resources were often marginal and incapable of viable exploitation by other means (Anderson and Grove, 1987).

The overall result of such approaches was an environmental crisis and its attendant social, intellectual, economic, political, ecological and cultural dimensions. To the local people, conservation became a real political issue with serious socio-economic and cultural repercussions. The excessive concern of colonial governments with wildlife was incongruous and unbalanced (Parker, 1982) and set man and wildlife apart, thereby destroying the historical, biological and cultural link between the two. Increasingly, there were conflicts arising between conservation and legitimate human demands for rural development that ensure people of their basic needs. This issue demanded political justification just as the exclusion of the rural poor from gazetted lands did. But conservation practice ignored both, opting for the military approach to conservation thereby setting in and sustaining the chain of social and political phenomena with far reaching consequences.

In the recent past, it became clear that the Western-influenced conservation practice was socially unresponsive and divisive, promoted environmental degradation and had a role in the generation and enhancement of poverty - the worst of all pollutants of the environment. It became easily discernible that a link existed between environmental degradation and poverty; that at one point environmental degradation translated into economic decline; and that, ultimately, social and political disintegration were the product of economic, social and political collapse. It was also possible to see the link between the human discontent that resulted and the lack of interest in the political culture and process, social and political unrest, human rights violations and coups and environmental refugee malaise. A point of no return was perpetuated in the environment in which further environmental risks and decay were inevitable. This was a vicious circle - the antithesis of development and conservation. The manifestation of the vicious circle resulted in more human discontent to which response was often military. And so the vicious circle was maintained in the African environment, with all its social, economic, intellectual, political and ecological ramifications.

Present environment conservation practice in Africa

A strong continuity persists between the conservation policies of the colonial states and the independence governments of Africa. For example, while virtually no or little attention is paid to the environmentally destructive government policies, misuse and deterioration of resources through pastoralist activities of the local people continue to be used as a basis for a variety of landuse and development strategies. Government policies are continually modified to make further alienation of land more acceptable to the people by offering ostensibly greater participation in decision-making and providing alternative resources to them. On the whole, favoured policies are those that are seldom based upon the real participation or consent of the local people who are the victims of the policies (Anderson and Grove, 1987).

Such policies emphasise short-term political and economic gains and reflect the thinking and practice of politicians. Politicians seldom talk and presumably seldom think holistically (Caldwell, 1984). They are concerned with current economic and political power and about strengthening their positions. This explains why a very large number of political decisions relating to environmental issues have been and continue to be made on the basis of economics.
For example, political decisions made on the basis of economics have emphasised road construction to connect urban centres to rural areas and the benefits thereof with no due regard to the ecological or environmental effects of the road on, say, a forest through which it may pass. At the same time, politicians and planners are increasingly showing impatience, if not irritation, towards the results and attitudes of academic conservationists. Instead, they are relying on quick surveys as a basis for making environmental decisions. This is leading to environmental risks and decay that threaten to disrupt our socio-economic and political fabric further.

Little or no serious effort has been made to make research and management resources in African more compatible with local cultural and environmental conditions. Yet studies of the customs and the knowledge, experience and skills of the local people can enhance rural resources conservation and development.

In Uganda, conservation laws overlook cultural tradition dependent on hunting. Those who have persisted with their traditional practices using traditional weapons, such as the spear, are regarded as trespassers and are subject to imprisonment if they venture onto land from which they were evicted - the National Parks or forest reserves.
In essence, conservation laws in their present form are socio-economically divisive and disruptive, serving to exclude local people from the use of the resources of the areas that they depend on.

The professional staff of land management and co-operating agencies in environmental conservation are, by and large, products of a disciplinary curriculum in forestry, wildlife, biology, fisheries, range management, botany, zoology, geography, etc. They have not been trained to simplify ecosystems for efficient generation of trees or activities such as recreation.
Frequently, changes of government reflect an unstable political process and culture. Such changes have far-reaching consequences for the environment. Those aspiring to take over government often wage guerrilla or bush war in wildlife areas as did happen in the Luwero Triangle of Uganda in the early 1980s. Or else an incoming government, less or symbolically committed to conservation, can easily frustrate the good achievements of a previous government. This may, for example, be achieved by the government exercising its right to withdraw from or disregard international conventions. Also, countries may leave their conservation laws to be anti-people and disjointed, without a comprehensive and integrated land policy, although this is a necessary pre-requisite for environmentally sound resource policy. Consequently a country’s political leadership functions as a roadblock to conservation. It is unable to provide environmental leadership.

There is increasing geo-social, geo-political and geo-economical influences on conservation in the under-developed world. This is being achieved through Western concepts of environmental management such as Our Common Future, Our Common Heritage, North-South Survival, Structural Adjustment Programme and NEAP. Being foreign concepts they tend to take up-bottom orientations, ignoring the time-tested environmental conservation and management strategies of the local people.

One school of thought holds that such concepts are being used as a convenient rationalisation for gene-poor countries of the North who desperately need resources enabled from the gene-rich countries of the South (Altieri, 1989). According to the school such rationalisation has enabled developed countries to maintain maximum access to genetic resources of the South under the façade of altruism that is neither aid nor assistance (Altieri, 1989). This is a massive programme of foreign aid from the countries of the South for countries of the North (Altieri, 1989).

Among the nascent environmental movements in Africa today are those who think and reason that the North has realised that its own survival may be threatened by the global environmental degradation process that it initiated and continues to maintain. These people believe that it is for this reason that a concern to conserve ecosystems in the South has become a global issue. According to them, the geo-politically, geo-economically and geo-socially-powerful World Bank is erasing its former image of an environmentally destructive institution for the same reason by setting in motion the NEAP process in Africa.

A number of African countries have, under the political, economic and social might of the World Bank, been compelled to accept the arguments of environmental management policies that favour securing the ecological resources and service of the ecosystems of the South for continual subsidy of the affluence and profligacy and, at times, selfishness of the North.
Through NEAP process, Africa is being asked to engage in urgent and strict conservation but the North is not being asked to drastically reduce its level of consumerism and waste. For the most part, environmental conservation ideas from outside are always finding easy acceptance by political leaders and land managers. This is because the majority were never trained to handle the current environmental crisis. They are ready to accept any idea without question.

The lack of creativity and critical analysis among Africa’s adapted conservationists and policy makers is confounding the issue. What is happening has consequences for the sovereignty of Africans over their natural resources and the direction of conservation in the continent.

The area of crop genetic conservation is crucial to the protection of Africa’s sovereignty and efforts to ensure food security and a wholesome environment. Unfortunately, this has attracted the full social, political and economic might of multinationals whereby a few foreign crops such as rice, wheat and Irish potatoes, are being encouraged in our environment at the expense of more traditional foods, such as sweet potatoes, yams and cassava, through farming systems research strategy of nutritional domination.

Future environmental conservation practice in Africa

Indications are that conservation in Africa will be increasingly influenced by Western ideas of environmental management. The products of disciplinary knowledge will continue to manage the resources of the continent. Governments will continue to be preoccupied with economic and balance of payments problems on the one hand, and ensuring political survival on the other. They will not act to introduce appropriate conservation programmes until they are forced, perhaps by a series of environmental disasters or by a wave of social unrest (Areola, 1987). The tendency, therefore, will be to erect short-term, reactive, rather than anticipatory, plans. Programmes related to conservation, which do not yield immediate results will not enter the order of priorities.

Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) are likely to become the main actors in promoting conservation because they are accumulating the cultural skills, and are gaining access to rural communities and agro-ecological expertise, to address the food security problems of the rural people (Altieri, 1989). They are also increasingly showing the commitment to agricultural productivity and health security in a way that significantly benefits the local people. Their research, training and education efforts aimed at linking crop genetic conservation and rural development should be supported, complemented and expanded by national and international organisations (Altieri, 1989).

Foreign aid including environmental aid, will in future, as in the past, be instrumental in sustaining environmentally corrupt and unaccountable leaderships in Africa. Such sustenance will give these leaderships an image of legitimacy, respectability and enhanced powers to exploit and oppress the poor and suppress the growth of environmental awareness, whether political, economic or social.
The result will be new environmental risks and decay as governments respond to purely environmental risks and decay as governments respond to purely environmental issues with military might. At the same time, geo-political, geo-social and geo-economic interests in environmental conservation by multinationals will increasingly ensure that the African environment is dominated by foreign capital well into the 21st century.
With this trend environmental conservation will remain a real and sensitive political and social issue for the rural poor of Africa.

Conclusions

The ultimate goal of conservation is to succeed. It is the attitude of local people that will ultimately count. The present conservation dilemmas in Africa are due to sets of rules and patterns of behaviour that have been imposed from outside local cultural traditions. Building from indigenous knowledge, experience and skills, Africa can find a way of improving the lot of its people. The full participation, and not just the artificial mobilisation or manipulation of the people is necessary.

There is need for a progressive reorganisation of the knowledge accumulated in the areas of resource use and management and the creation of new educational programmes that cater for a wider variety of persons who analyse environmental issues and make decisions.
If bad policies have been the cause of African’s environmental crisis, environmental bankruptcy has been its driving force. Whatever professionals recommend, decision-making will always remain the prerogative of politicians. Politicians must be convinced that solutions to the problems of the environment and development are to their advantage.