By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Are African leaders aware that, in a decade or two, one of the most expensive commodities on the continent will be firewood – unless they become resolutely intentional about provision of clean, renewable energy urgently?

It is coming to a month since a man-made garbage mountain near Kampala collapsed, burying people alive, and giving us time to think more about preventing different forms of disaster.

But, due to short memories or to fatalist mindsets that we cannot prevent disaster, chances are that, as the initial shock wears off, we may revert to business as usual and not take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. So, after a few years, another garbage mountain will kill more people and the falling mountains will get more frequent and spread to other urban areas as the population grows.

Would we then ape our “primitive” ancestors who used to pack up and relocate to a faraway area when a clansman died, so as to escape the “bad luck”? But we would soon run out of places to escape falling garbage, as the population grows and more landgrabbers fence off public and communal lands. And disappearing communal lands will disappear with the source of wood for cooking.

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Such is the trouble with man-made disasters in careless societies; they not only increase in frequency and magnitude but they are also accompanied by new disasters altogether, but all born of the same mother – carelessness.

Many well-to-do Africans may find a discussion on firewood too far from them to deserve a minute of their time, yet a majority of our people depend on burning biomass for cooking. If a society reaches a stage where the majority need to fight to get the next meal, then nobody in that society is safe.

If we want to avoid fighting on many fronts and succumb like an ailing patient to multiple organ failure, we must tackle head-on those hazards that we have the ability to handle, and free our hands to fight other threats before they get out of hand.

If you are one of those townspeople who go to the village once a week or month to “check on developments there” or to “prepare the retirement home,” you may have started noticing a new item creeping onto the budget of your caretakers – firewood.

Yes, quietly, it is becoming another responsibility of townspeople to provide firewood to the countryfolk. What some “weekend farmers” have started doing is to compete with mamas who run makeshift restaurants in urban informal settlements for scaffolding wood from building sites.

A few coins to the site porter and he fills your car boot with scaffolding softwood, sawn to fit in, on Friday evening or Saturday morning, and you are in for a grand welcome from the village folk. If you want a pickup load, you may have to deal with the building foreman, so you take priority over the women cooks who deal with the site porter.

That is where we have reached, or are heading, depending where you live, as pieces of firewood start getting more valued than meat by our upcountry kin. There is simply less and less firewood, you no longer “fetch” or “collect” it from the forest.

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The only forests there are have either been planted by someone who hires (armed) guards to protect them, or are protected by governments that only pay lip service to tree and woodlot planting campaigns, punctuated with not-to-be-fulfilled promises of cooking gas subsidised equipment and supply.

Of course, some countries are more endowed with vegetation cover than others. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, may not run out of firewood for some more decades, so ordinary Ugandans may choose to make war or love with the Congolese to access their firewood.

For now, it is love. The Sudanese may have to learn persuasion from the Ugandan brothers to access DRC’s firewood hassle-free.

There is an alternative. We have abundant deposits of silicon in our sand. That is the stuff used to make solar panels. We also have lithium and cobalt to store the energy tapped from the sun. What is needed is the technology to put these together.

The leaders should source these using the money they collect in taxes from the citizens. Is that asking too much? And, while at it, the same materials can make batteries for powering off-rail transport.

Put in plain language, by making the batteries, half of the process to make as many electric cars as our people may desire will be done.

So, overnight (which comes after some years of hard work), we will have averted the looming firewood crisis, eliminated almost all vehicular pollution and stopped throwing away money to import fossil fuel.

This, certainly, isn’t too complicated for African leaders to fathom. Or is it?

Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail:[email protected]