If you have remotely opened any eyes or ears recently, you are most probably convinced, if you were not, that global warming is real. In parts of Europe, city temperatures have soared over 100 degrees Fahrenheit this summer, while one-third of the US population has seen heat alerts for most of the past month.
“Air conditioning!” you say? Well, air conditioners are a part of the conundrum: they may keep you cool inside but elevate the heat outside. And your kind of building may be generating more heat than others, thus requiring more air-conditioning.
In other words, those N1.14 billion Toyota Land Cruisers the President, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari (retd) quietly donated to Niger Republic—a nation far more secure than Nigeria—allegedly for security, may be keeping the lucky government officials cool, but worsening the country’s climate case.
Not that climate change is of much importance to Nigerian officials. Why improve Nigerian schools when they can send their children to Canada or Scotland? Why build hospitals when they can obtain medical care in England while the wife seeks gluteal augmentation in Spain or the United Arab Emirates?
But that is not how other minds are working or other societies advancing. In that UAE, one of the hottest places on earth, they are responding to the climate crisis by deploying an ancient architectural technique known as “mashrabiya,” using latticed screens which keeps a building cool by diffusing sunlight.
In Medellin, Columbia, the city has deployed an urban greening programmed it calls “Green Corridors,” combating climate change by creating thick vegetation areas along 18 roads and 12 waterways.
In a similarly creative response, Miami Dade county in the US state of Florida created “Neat Streets Miami,” a scheme which identified bus stops as being of special concern in a heat wave. They developed a scheme to plant trees around 10 bus stops, along with an elaborate ‘how-to’guide. There are now over 70 such bus stops in the county as various communities join in.
These are projects that have arisen from the concern of officials to advance the public interest, after all, an overheating climate does not exactly penetrate the cool offices of such officials individually.
Nigeria differs. Take our congested city roads, for instance, the experience of Lagos immortalised by the late Afro beat king, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, in “Confusion,” a song in which he captured the nightmare of governance in the form of infrastructural menace in post-civil warNigeria.
He deployed the image of “Ojuelegba,” the road intersection in Surulere, Lagos, where—with each motorist compelled to look out for himself—all traffic often came to a halt:
“For Ojuelegba, moto dey come from south
Moto dey come from north
Moto dey come from east
Moto dey come from west…”