Fighting for energy and human rights equality in Africa

The Congress of Racial Equality Uganda has lost another leader, but the fight continues

Paul Driessen

“She has gone to the Lord,” her sister Diana told me a few days ago. And with Fiona Kobusingye’s passing, after a courageous battle with cancer, the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda lost another leader.

However, their legacy remains, the battles they began rage on – and Uganda and Africa are clearly and consistently demonstrating their determination to achieve energy, health, human rights and living standards equality with Europe, America and other industrialized economies. They are determined do so using the same fossil fuel and other technologies that those already wealthy nations used in their ascent out of the nasty, brutish, short lives that were all of humanity’s lot just a few short centuries ago.

I met Fiona 15 years ago at a Congress of Racial Equality Martin Luther King dinner organized by her late husband and my close friend, CORE international affairs director Cyril Boynes, Jr. They got married, Cyril moved to Uganda, and together they launched the human rights and economic development group CORE Uganda. She served as co-chair and with Cyril mentored young people, co-hosted conferences, and fought tirelessly for disease control, energy development, modern agriculture and clean water.

Like Cyril, she was passionate about these issues, including using DDT and other insecticides – what she called “the African equivalent of chemotherapy drugs” – to prevent malaria and other devastating insect-borne diseases. She wrote in a 2006 Washington Times article:

“I have had malaria more than a dozen times. I lost my son, two sisters and three nephews to it. My nephew Noel got malaria at age two and is still four years behind high school boys his age in reading and writing skills, because it affected his mental powers so horribly. My brother Joseph used to help in an office and with complex farming tasks, but his mind no longer works well because of cerebral malaria.  
“We need to calculate the value of those lives affected by being sick with malaria for weeks every year … of mental capacity lost due to malaria … of 1.5 million African lives lost every year. Even at $1,000 to $10,000 per life, the impact of malaria – and the value of DDT – is monumental. 

“This month, another malaria outbreak hit the Kabale district in southern Uganda. More than 6,000 people were admitted to clinics in just one week. A spraying program with Icon (a pyrethroid also used in agriculture, and which thus can quickly breed mosquito resistance) resulted in the deaths of two students. That is terrible, but last year 70,000 Ugandans died from malaria. In 65 years, DDT never killed anyone. 

“Should we stop spraying, to prevent more deaths from Icon or possible learning delays from using DDT – and sacrifice another 70,000 Ugandans again this year? 

“Yes, there are risks in using DDT – or other anti-malaria weapons. But the risk of not using them is infinitely greater. One-sided studies and news stories frighten people into not using the most effective weapons in our arsenal – and millions pay the ultimate price. That is unconscionable.”

After Cyril died in 2015, Fiona moved to New York City to help care for Diana’s autistic son and earn money to provide for her adopted children in Uganda. Even after being diagnosed with incurable cancer, Fiona retained her humor, indomitable spirit and deep belief in God throughout her difficult illness and treatment, right up until she passed away.

She is survived by a daughter, five sisters, eleven brothers, two grandchildren, five adopted children, and many nieces, nephews and other relatives. She remains beloved by all who knew her. Readers wishing to honor her legacy, bury her in Uganda and help support her family can go to her GoFundMe page.

Fiona got emotional when she wrote about environmentalist groups and US, EU, World Bank, WHO and other rich country bureaucrats who she believed were using Africans as test subjects in “energy, malaria and agricultural experiments that perpetuate poverty, disease, malnutrition and death in the name of protecting the environment.”

“China and India put up with this immoral eco-colonialism for decades,” she wrote. “Finally, they had enough. They refused to be the environmentalists’ experimental pawns any longer. They took charge of their own destinies, charted their own future, financed their own projects, and refused to be stopped again by anti-development green policies, politicians and pressure groups.

“Uganda, the Great Lakes Region [around Lake Victoria] and all of Africa need to do the same thing. We have the land and natural resources, the bright and hard-working people.

“Let us be brave and bold!” Fiona exhorted. “Let us become prosperous and healthy together.”

Her beloved Cyril shared and stoked her passions. He too wrote articles and spoke to Ugandan officials, journalists and students on these topics. A biotechnology conference he organized at the United Nations featured experts like Norman Borlaug, father of the first Green Revolution. The audience included scores of high school students, many UN staffers and people from all over New York City.

Cyril also served as executive producer for a documentary film about the ways modern genetically modified crops dramatically reduce the need for poor African farmers to hand-spray crops with pesticides, while preventing pest damage, increasing crop yields many times over, and bringing hope and much improved living standards to African farm families.

He too dreamed of a prosperous modern Africa and described how he, a devout Christian, was deeply inspired by a Jew (business professor, economist and author Julian Simon) and a Muslim (banker-economist Muhammad Yunus). He pilloried the Rainforest Action Network for its incessant human rights violations: its campaigns to prevent Africa from using DDT or other insecticides, fossil fuels or even expanded hydroelectric power.

Cyril brought me to Uganda, to see firsthand what they were accomplishing. The three of us spent two frenzied weeks speaking to government, radio, television, high school and university audiences on these subjects. Thanks to George Mason University, we were able to give soccer balls, shoes, shin guards and uniforms to grade school boys who previously had to play barefoot with rags rolled and tied into a ball.

Fiona and Cyril aided her extended family and mentored scores of promising young people. One of them, Steven Lyazi, steadily improved his writing skills and published many articles online, before he was tragically killed in a horrific bus accident in 2017.

“Calls for us to live ‘sustainably,’ use wind and solar and biofuel power, and never use fossil fuels, are a demand that we accept prolonged starvation and death in our poor countries,” Steven wrote in one article. “They mean desperate people will do horrible things to survive, even just another day.” 

In another column, he pointed out that wind and solar power are far better than wood and animal dung fires. But in reality they are nothing more than “short-term solutions to serious, immediate problems. They do not equal real economic development or really improved living standards. Our cities need abundant, reliable electricity, and for faraway villages wind and solar must be only temporary, to meet basic needs until they can be connected to transmission lines and a grid.”

When will the day come, Steven wondered – echoing what Fiona and Cyril had been saying for over a decade – when politicians and activists, who say their care about the world’s poor, “stop worrying about global warming, pesticides and GMO crops – and start helping us get the energy, food, medical facilities, technologies, jobs and economic growth we need to improve our lives?”

Fiona, Cyril and Steven live on in their eloquent, passionate articles. Their long battle for equality and human rights, through access to modern technologies, will continue – bringing their dream of a free, prosperous, healthy, vibrant Uganda and Africa ever closer to reality. 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on the environment.

 

Battling malaria in Uganda

No more terrifying phone calls. We need the world’s help to save our children’s lives.
Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes

My mobile phone rang. Another nephew was down with malaria, a friend told me. Lying in his hospital bed, quinine running through his veins, Emmanuel felt the pain wracking his body. I knew it was bad, because every time I get malaria I endure the same agony and treatments.

Emma was lucky. A week earlier, he had arranged goat exports to Saudi Arabia. Although his meagre earnings would now pay hospital bills, instead of buying things he and his family desperately needed, at least he would still have his weakened body, his life and another chance.

Every day, a million Africans are stricken by this horrible disease. The possibility of sudden death is so real that all other considerations become minor, and people just find any available money for medical bills.

Malaria has been with us for thousands of years, yet ignorance about it is still rampant. Some rural Africans still resort to ancient techniques and even associate it with witchcraft practiced against them by their neighbours. They treat victims with drum sounds, herbal mixtures and restrictions against certain foods. Naturally, many die under such care, generating vicious hostility between victims’ families and suspected “spell casters,” with disputes sometimes erupting in violence.

And so, one by one by a million, malaria exacts its toll. Meanwhile, too many people who could make a difference simply attend conferences, talk, write reports, and distribute educational materials and bed nets. Environmentalists rant about the supposed risks of insecticides, but never mention their obvious benefits: preventing disease and saving lives. Businessmen worry about Europeans blocking exports if Africans use DDT or other insecticides.

It’s the Western equivalent to drums and not eating too many mangoes. And our children keep dying.

I wish they could see what I have seen, and hear the stories I have heard. Mothers whose babies’ lives were snuffed out while they were holding them in their arms. Fathers who were so sick with malaria that they could barely stand, but still had to toil in fields every day to feed their families.

Pregnant women in villages I visit, who struggle to collect water and firewood – whose bodies are infested with malaria parasites that are just waiting to finish their incubation and strike them down. Children whose minds were destroyed by cerebral malaria. Women (like me, when I was young) whose marriages were ruined because the disease killed their babies, and their husbands left them.

Who is safe from mosquitoes that inject malarial parasites into African people? Even the wealthy are not immune. But the vast majority are our poor fisher folks, subsistence farmers, cattle nomads, labourers in city slums. They are my hard working friends, colleagues and relatives, whose minuscule incomes are constantly spent treating this disease. They are cured for a while, but the mosquitoes bite again and, like the monthly rent, they must pay doctors again, or get evicted forever from this Earth.

How long must we exist like this, barely holding onto our lives, hoping that somewhere some merciful policy makers will throw us life-saving ropes, so that we can come aboard the modern ship that is free from this disease, that offers a small measure of hope and prosperity? We see the ships, but their captains refuse to throw us the insecticide lifeline that could save so many.

Even silence and inaction in the face of such tragedy is a clear decision. The European Union – whose members once colonized, ruled and mistreated our people – has frequently turned its eyes and ears from our tragedy, and refused to support and applaud the use of insecticides. Even worse, we are told that the EU or import companies or European consumers will ban flowers and foods from Uganda and Kenya – or refuse to buy them – if we use DDT to save lives. They know their attitudes and decisions will persuade others to ignore our plight and impose similar restrictions on us. Yet they refuse to budge – and our babies continue to die.

The ban on DDT was clearly political – not scientific or medical or based on actual evidence that people were getting cancer or being poisoned. But we are still pressured not to use this miracle repellent. We are told to wait for vaccines that will hopefully come some day, but are not here yet.

Africa’s death toll demands that effective solutions be employed, and we know from hard experience which ones work, and which do not. We know that nets and ACT drugs help, but not enough. We know spraying with DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes out of our homes for six months, and sometimes even an entire year. We know it can cut malaria by 75% in less than two years.

The world simply has to lift restrictions that should never have been imposed on us. We need access to all malaria-fighting weapons, so that we can use whatever ones are most appropriate, in a given time or place or situation.

We need to tell activist groups like Pesticide Action Network and Greenpeace and much of the United Nations: Your policies are sentencing millions of Africans to terrible, unnecessary suffering and death. Europe and the United States used DDT to eliminate malaria, without harming their people or environment. You could save lives, and bring health and prosperity to Africa, by simply repudiating your own witch doctor beliefs and policies, replacing them with science and humanitarian concern, and letting us use DDT to repel mosquitoes and insecticides to kill mosquitoes. Your policies violate our human rights and kill children who could become our continent’s next Einstein or Beethoven.

Organisations that claim to care about reducing human suffering must lift their voices and demand change. History will judge them harshly if they do not come to their senses, support DDT for spraying household walls, and end their unconscionable threats against our children.

The United States Congress, US Agency for International Development, President’s Malaria Initiative, World Health Organization and European Commission finally changed their policies. They now support and sometimes fund indoor spraying with DDT. Other government and health agencies must now do the same. Saying you care, and then supporting policies that perpetuate disease and death, is lethal hypocrisy. It has to end.

We, the people of Africa, applaud these countries and organizations for their actions. We welcome their increased spending on malaria programs and especially on proven insecticides and DDT.

However, our burden is too heavy. We continue to lose our loved ones to this disease. We have too many in your communities whose minds have been poisoned by years of negative publicity against DDT. We are perpetually impoverished by this debilitating disease.

We cannot do it alone. Our global partners must help us and set a good example.

Please, World Bank, United Nations, UNICEF, European Union and Greenpeace – we need you to do the right thing. Help us control and eventually stamp out killer malaria. Help us do what you did in your own countries, to make them free of this vicious disease, to make them healthy and prosperous. Join hands with us, instead of putting your hands up to block our way.

Let history and God judge you kindly.

_________________Fiona Kobusingye is coordinator of the Congress Of Racial Equality Uganda (http://core-africa.org/) and the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now Brigade. She is featured in the new film, “Not Evil Just Wrong,” which reveals the inhuman side of radical environmentalism, and is a tireless advocate for human rights to effective malaria control.

This article originally appeared on www.townhall.com on November 18, 2009

Africa's Real Climate Crisis

It’s not global warming. It’s a science, priorities, honesty and morality crisis.

by Fiona Kobusingye

Lung infections cause 1.4 million deaths, malaria 1 million more, intestinal diseases 700,000. Diseases that could be prevented with simple vaccines kill an additional 600,000 annually, while war, malnutrition and life in filthy slums send countless more parents and children to early graves.

And yet, day after day, Africans are told the biggest threat we face is – global warming.

Conferences, news stories, television programs, class lectures and one-sided “dialogues” repeat the claim endlessly. Using oil and petrol, even burning wood and charcoal, will dangerously overheat our planet, melt ice caps, flood coastal cities, and cause storms, droughts, disease and extinctions, we’re told.

Over 700 climate scientists and 31,000 other scientists say humans and plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide have minimal effects on Earth’s temperature and climate, and there is no global warming crisis. But their views and studies are never invited or even tolerated in these “climate crisis” forums, especially at “ministerial dialogues” staged with United Nations money. Al Gore refuses to debate any of these experts, or even permit questions that he hasn’t approved ahead of time.

Instead, Africans are told climate change “threatens humanity more than HIV/AIDS.” More than 2.2 million dead Africans every year?

We are warned that it would be “nearly impossible to adapt to the loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet,” which would raise sea levels by “5 to 15 meters.” That certainly would impact our coastal communities. But how likely is it?

The average annual temperature in Antarctica is minus 50 degrees F! Summer in its Western Peninsula barely lasts two months and gets maybe 10 degrees above freezing for just a few hours a day. Not even Mr. Gore or UN computer models talk about raising Antarctic temperatures by 85 degrees F year-round. So how is that ice supposed to melt?

Let’s not forget that sea levels have risen 120 meters since the last Ice Age ended. Do the global warming alarmists think cave men fires caused that? Obviously, powerful natural forces caused those ancient glaciers to come and go – and caused the droughts, floods and climate changes that have affected Africa, the Earth and its animals and people for millions of years.

Just consider northern Africa, where green river valleys, hippopotami and happy villages suddenly got turned into the Sahara Desert 4,000 years ago. Scientists don’t know why, but it probably wasn’t Egyptian pharaohs building pyramids and driving chariots.

However, the real problem isn’t questionable or fake science, hysterical claims and worthless computer models that predict global warming disasters. It’s that they’re being used to justify telling Africans that we shouldn’t build coal or natural gas electrical power plants. It’s that the almost total absence of electricity is keeping us from creating jobs and becoming modern societies. It’s that these policies KILL.

The average African life span is lower than it was in the United States and Europe 100 years ago. But Africans are being told we shouldn’t develop, or have electricity or cars because, now that those countries are rich beyond anything we Africans can imagine, they’re worried about global warming.

The world needs to go on an energy diet, Al Gore and UN climate boss Yvo de Boer tell us. Well, I have news for them. Africans are already on an energy diet. We’re starving!

Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year. And those anti-electricity policies are keeping us impoverished.

Not having electricity means millions of Africans don’t have refrigerators to preserve food and medicine. Outside of wealthy parts of our big cities, people don’t have lights, computers, modern hospitals and schools, air conditioning – or offices, factories and shops to make things and create good jobs.

Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities.

Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this?

Telling Africans they can’t have electricity and economic development – except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels – is immoral. It is a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, China and India are building new coal-fired power plants every week, so that they can lift their people out of poverty. So even if Africa remains impoverished – and the US and Europe switched to windmills and nuclear power – global carbon dioxide levels would continue increasing for decades.

Even worse, the global warming crusaders don’t stop at telling us we can’t have electricity. They also campaign against biotechnology. As American, Brazilian and South African farmers will tell you, biotech seeds increase crop yields, reduce pesticide use, feed more people and help farmers earn more money. New varieties are being developed that can resist droughts – the kind Africa has always experienced, and the ones some claim will increase due to global warming.

Environmental radicals even oppose insecticides and the powerful spatial insect repellant DDT, which Uganda’s Health Ministry is safely using (along with bed nets and modern ACT drugs) to eliminate killer malaria. They claim global warming will make malaria worse. That’s ridiculous, because the disease was once found all over Europe, the United States and even Siberia.

Uganda and Africa need to stop worrying about what the West, the UN and Al Gore say. We need to focus on our own needs, resources and opportunities.

We don’t need more aid – especially the kind that goes mostly to corrupt officials who put the money in private bank accounts, hold global warming propaganda conferences and keep their own people poor. We don’t need rich countries promising climate change assistance (maybe, sometime, ten years from now), if we promise not to develop.

We need to stop acting like ignorant savages, who thought solar eclipses meant the gods were angry with them, and asked witch doctors to bring the sun back. We need to stop listening to global warming witch doctors, who get rich telling us to keep living “indigenous,” impoverished lives.

We need trade, manufacturing, electricity and transportation fuels to power modern industrial economies. We need to do what China and India are doing – develop – and trade more with them.

That is how we will get the jobs, prosperity, health and environmental quality we deserve.

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Fiona Kobusingye is chairman of the human rights and economic development group CORE Uganda. In the coming months, CORE will present both Al Gore’s movie and another film, “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” at colleges and other events. It will do what Al Gore and the UN never permit: let people ask questions, debate the films and decide for themselves who is telling the truth, and what Uganda and Africa should do to make life better for their people.

Mr President, DDT will end malaria

(As you can see, this was originally published in 2006 and permission was given to me by Mrs. Kobusingye to reprint it in my old blog. I believe it is worth reprinting. Ridiculous claims are constantly being made by the anti-pesticide crowd about DDT; I think we need to put a face on the need for DDT. Let us open our eyes to what people living in these countries are really suffering and recognize that this is what the anti-pesticide green crowd would promulgate in the whole world; dystopia. RK)

By Fiona Kobusingye

Thursday, 8th June, 2006

DEAR Mr. President, in recent days the business community has written to you and even taken out newspaper ads opposing your carefully considered decision to fight malaria using indoor residual spraying with DDT. We are deeply concerned that this could undo years of hard work, undermine new USAID policies and programs, and result in needless deaths.

These businesses are worried about threats to ban exports from Uganda if traces of DDT are found in food products or flowers. We believe these fears are misplaced. Exports to European and other countries are vital to the nation’s future as they bring jobs and revenue to Uganda. However, other considerations are equally important:

Nothing is more important than protecting our people’s lives and health against the impact of malaria is. By contrast, concerns about revenue losses are speculative. They assume the European threats will be carried out and fail to recognize that international support is growing for indoor spraying with DDT, while pressure is building against anyone who threatens actions against life-saving insecticides and anti-malaria programs.

• The stigma and loud condemnation will come not from using DDT but from failing to use it; from putting profits and baseless fears about insecticides like DDT ahead of human lives. The stigma will go to former colonialist powers that are now malaria-free (thanks to DDT and modern housing which only wealthy people can afford), and that now demand environmental purity from poor people who still suffer and die from malaria.

• Indoor residual spraying does not contaminate the environment with DDT. Small amounts are used, by trained specialists, under carefully controlled programs that also safeguard the supplies, transportation and use of the insecticide. Only the walls and eaves of houses are sprayed; the chemical is not sprayed outdoors, the way it was in Europe and the United States years ago. So the chance of any DDT getting onto crops or flowers is almost zero.

• Concerns about DDT being harmful to wildlife or people are also misplaced. Despite decades of studies, no one has ever shown that DDT causes cancer or anything worse than skin rashes on people. Most claims about harm to animals have also been disproven – even when large amounts of DDT were sprayed on trees and fields.

• Past aid agency efforts simply have not worked. Bed nets, education and other “approved” programs have done little to reduce malaria — which is why South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and now Uganda and Tanzania are turning to DDT and other insecticides, which do work.

• Contrary to what the business ads say, DDT does not attack malaria parasites; it attacks mosquitoes. The parasites do not build up resistance to DDT, though they have to chloroquine. And while mosquitoes can build up resistance to DDT’s killer properties, if the insecticide is overused (which would not be the case in IRS programs), they do not build resistance to DDT’s amazing repellent properties, which in effect put a long-lasting net over an entire house and all its occupants.

• Businesses would be much better off if their workers and the business executives’ own families were not at constant risk from malaria. By using DDT in conjunction with modern ACT drugs, we can eliminate malaria from most parts of our country and population. People could work, attend school, care for their families, have money to spend on things other than anti-malaria medicine, make our country prosperous, and address our energy, transportation and other health problems.

Mr. President, I myself have suffered many times from malaria, and now my internal system is totally out of balance. I lost my son, two sisters and three nephews to this vicious disease. In one year, 50 of the 500 orphan children who attended the school that my husband and I help sponsor died from malaria! There is probably not a single family in Uganda, or all of Sub-Saharan Africa, that has not lost loved ones to this disease.

Caring people have been working for years to change policies about the use of DDT. Finally, just a few months ago, USAID decided that the disease and death tolls were unconscionable and intolerable. USAID changed its policies. It is now supporting and paying for indoor spraying with DDT and other chemicals. Other agencies are also thinking seriously about supporting indoor spraying with DDT.

Mr. President, the business community fears losing export markets and money. But we must not lose sight of our single most important objective: protecting the health and lives of our precious, irreplaceable people. I therefore beg you, Mr. President, please ignore the newspaper ads. Listen to us, the people whose lives are in danger. Please don’t give us a death sentence. Give us life and good health.

Mr. President, my experience and suffering allowed me to testify in 2004 at a Martin Luther King Day conference in New York and present my statement to a US House of Representatives committee hearing. These actions, and the efforts of many others, have brought many allies to our side. President George Bush and USAID are supporting and paying for DDT. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and hundreds of clergy and doctors have signed a declaration supporting DDT to control malaria. They have been joined by renown international researchers, civil rights activists, NGO leaders and environmentalists, policy analysts and authors. Mr. President, if we join with them, we will become an unstoppable force.

Organisations that fund health and development programs will follow USAID’s wise example, including WHO, World Bank, UNICEF and European Union. Uganda will become like the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and China – all of which once had malaria but eradicated it using DDT.

Mr. President, I have suffered so much from malaria. Whenever I think about the possibility of a malaria-free Uganda, I am overjoyed by the vision that one day Ugandans could wake up to lives freed from constant fear of disease and death to lives where good health brings prosperity, when we no longer have to spend our hard-earned money on treating this disease and burying its victims. That will be a day when we can compete equally with farmers and businessmen from other nations and take our rightful places in a fair and just world.

With the help of your good government, we have registered as an NGO here locally called CORE Uganda Chapter. We believe that global racial equality is possible, that the same rights enjoyed in other parts of the world should be accessed freely by all, and that God has given our leaders the power and obligation to fulfil this for their people.

Mr. President, I am a woman with a big, but simple wish: That you will hear the voices of people who want to be safe in their homes from mosquitoes that would sentence them to death by malaria. That you will empower your supporters even more strongly, and unite all Ugandans to fight our common enemies – the mosquitoes and the malaria they carry. And that we will all join in using sound science, good health practices and the great power of God to bring a new future to Uganda.

Thank you for considering our views, hearing our pleas and doing so much for all the people of Uganda. For God and my country!

The writer is the Regional Coordinator, Great Lakes, and Chairman of CORE Uganda


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