Ms. Hawe Hamman Bouba is the President of the African Indigenous Women’s Organisation – Central Africa Network (AIWO-CAN), Executive Commissioner, Cameroon Human Right Commission, and member of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (WGIP/ACHPR). She represented a member of the Advisory Board of NatureNews at its second anniversary lecture and HEAD Awards. She spoke with reporters. Excerpts
What is your reaction on Climate Financing for the Environment in Nigeria?
Climate change is very new, people are still coming to terms with climate change, and its impact itself is not something that communities, indigenous people and women get to know about because they are feeling the impact of climate change.
The people we need are here. We had the Minister of Environment. We had the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, we also had people from the private sectors, important companies, like Coca-cola who are doing innovative issues on mitigating. I think that for me I was satisfied with the ceremony. I’m satisfied with the work that NatureNews is doing with limited resources.
Everyone is feeling the impacts of climate change, whether you’re a minister or the President of the Republic, you are feeling the impact of climate change. If you have to stay in the air condition because you cannot go out into the hot sun, you have the impact of climate change. If you’re from the Niger Delta where the pollution is so high and the fish’s livelihoods, source. You are feeling it more again! If you are a nomadic person who has to leave the North, go to the South to look for pasture, you are the most impacted. If you have to leave Nigeria to go to Ghana, back to Cameroon and go to Central Africa with your cattle to look for pasture and water, you are highly impacted.
The women, girls, youth and the communities are more impacted, bearing the brunt of climate change. I speak for them. That is why I am here; to speak for indigenous people.
In bridging the gaps of pledges made at the COPs and trust on the Africa continent, what is your view?
Africans have to stand up, though Africa is not the polluter and the emitter. Africa is very impacted, Africa has droughts, floods, the impact is very high in Africa. The problem is that Africa doesn’t have the means to adapt while international communities, the global world adapt. The developed world has resources to even mitigate.
Africa doesn’t have enough resources even to permit our community to adapt. So Africa needs the resources and I think Africans should put their resources together because if we continue waiting for the pledges every year from the COPs we will be waiting for the next maybe by 2035. I think the worst scientists in the world if we don’t do if the world does not stand up to fight climate change by 2025 living will be very difficult on the earth. Africa needs to stand up. The pledge has been made, the appropriate amount of compensation for damages and loss has been created already. Africa is waiting for the funds but they said they will create an institution to manage the funds.
So you see there is already a problem. Who are the people who will manage them? So these pledges may linger before coming to Africa, because they will put their big structure which is high education to manage the funding and what we will be having in Africa will be something insignificant because when they bring their own people, the Europeans or the Americans to manage the funding in Africa part of it or more than half of it will be going for that institutional support and their salaries. Africa will finally end up having a lot of speeches which are not heading off anywhere but Africa.
