DROUGHTS; ARE WE PREPARED?

There is a new report by Texas A and M university which has predicted a severe drought in early 2017, to hit large parts of Africa. The warning is intended to inform African countries about what lies ahead of them so that they can come up with measures to mitigate the situation as early as possible. Already there is an ongoing drought which has affected most parts of Africa especially countries in the south. It has been reported that more than 40 million people have been affected by the drought, each passing day situation is worsening because there has been no serious response by governments in those countries.NGOs and humanitarian agencies have come in to help mitigate the situation. Which begs the question, how well are we prepared to face droughts in future? All signs show confused disaster preparedness in Africa as a whole. The presence of many international humanitarian agencies tells of a sad state of affairs. Yes, we have abundant resources to tackle most of these disasters but due to poor policies and poor planning, we have reduced ourselves to nations of paupers, we rely on developed countries to come to our rescue in many fronts. In developed countries, a drought is a little more than a social inconvenience because these countries plan early and very well. But we in Africa, do the opposite, we wait until they hit us badly then we respond. World’s worst droughts in history have occurred in Africa,statistcis,trends and even predictions are available for all of us to see and use but we have chosen to ignore them, our governments have done little to fully prepare for droughts. Instead of preparing trough good planning, they behave like proverbial ostrich in the face of a wild storm. We have to admit that generally, we are not prepared despite many resources and climatic advantages. Countries in Middle East which are purely desert and sole rely on irrigation, are well prepared and have advanced their irrigation schemes, they use a lot of resources since most of them do not have rivers and lakes, we in Africa have water bodies within our borders, we have rainy seasons, ironically during these boom seasons when food is plenty, a lot of it rot in the farms due to lack of infrastructure and yet infrastructure is within our governments capacity.