National Assembly Speaker Moses Wetang'ula has urged African Parliaments to embrace the Climate Change agenda through robust legislation. https://bit.ly/3r2vdZV
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00:00 Africa is a continent that has been for many years
00:08 been an object of pity by those who put us where we are
00:16 and an object of hopelessness.
00:19 But nobody will spring us from that despair and hopelessness
00:27 except ourselves.
00:28 [APPLAUSE]
00:31 You are told yesterday that all the commitments
00:36 from the developed world about adaptation funds, mitigation
00:42 funds, and all these climate change issues
00:47 have never been met to the full, sometimes not even 50%.
00:53 So we must be innovative as Africans.
00:58 We must think differently as Africans.
01:01 If you go to your villages, there
01:07 are stories that you'll be told by villagers who have never
01:13 gone to anybody's school.
01:14 But when you listen to them, the conclusion
01:17 is there is climate change.
01:21 You'll be told there used to be a big river here,
01:24 and all you see is a dry gully.
01:28 You'll be told there was a forest over there,
01:31 and when you look, you see no forest.
01:35 You'll be told we used to do things this way.
01:39 For those of you who have lived as long as I have,
01:44 in the '90s, in the '80s, in this country,
01:47 in the western part of Kenya-- for those of you
01:49 who come from the west, because our ecosystems are
01:52 a bit different--
01:54 by the last week of February, you
01:58 planted your maize, whether there was rain or not,
02:02 because you knew by the first week of March, there is rain.
02:05 And the rains will find the seeds in the soil.
02:12 They'll germinate.
02:14 They'll grow.
02:14 You'll harvest.
02:16 Today, the rains don't arrive sometimes up to end of March,
02:22 sometimes into April, sometimes not at all,
02:28 like we just went through the cycle of our worst droughts
02:31 in 40 years as a country.
02:36 And these changes, we are told, sometimes
02:40 are because of human activities.
02:44 We have also been told by those who believe differently
02:47 that it's because it's the wrath of God and many other things.
02:52 But we know the altruism is that the climate has changed
02:56 and changed for the worse.
02:58 And the genesis of this is human activities.
03:06 We live as if there's no tomorrow.
03:10 We pollute with total abundance.
03:14 If you drive on the streets of Nairobi sometimes,
03:17 as you drive, you see objects just flying out
03:20 of people's cars, packets of biscuits,
03:29 paper bags of junk food.
03:32 You just eat and throw them.
03:35 And in the process, we are destroying our continent.
03:39 But as you enroll as legislators,
03:44 you hold the purse of your countries.
03:47 The power of the purse lies in Parliament.
03:53 Whatever it is that we want to do,
03:56 you must stamp on the appropriations
03:59 of our resources.
04:02 So I want to encourage you as parliamentarians
04:06 to ensure that in your respective jurisdictions,
04:10 you are appropriating enough resources for adaptation
04:15 and mitigation programs on climate change.
04:20 [AUDIO OUT]
04:23 [BLANK_AUDIO]