“Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.” – Chico Mendes

Over the past few weeks, the lives of countless families have been turned upside down by heavy downpour currently being experienced in most parts of the country. At the time of writing this, over 200 people have lost their lives in Kenya and many more remain unaccounted for. A few days ago, we lost more than 40 people in Nairobi’s Mathare Slums after the Mathare River burst its banks and flooded parts of the settlement. Among the casualties in Mathare were Mama Victor and Jacinta Adhiambo together with her two dear children. The two women were members of the Mothers of Victims and Survivors Network, a group of mothers of the victims and survivors of police brutality in the countless informal settlements that dot the Nairobi landscape. Mama Victor, the Convenor of the network and her comrade Jacinta were discovered by comrades from the Social Justice Movement inside Mama Victor’s house last Wednesday after the water levels had subsided. The bodies of Jacinta’s kids were recovered by community members a day later along the river bed.

Like many others, Mama Victor and Jacinta lived through all forms of normalised abnormalities, from the extra-judicial execution of their sons, to surviving in dingy dwellings next to open sewers, to having to pay to access basic necessities like toilets or bathrooms.

Can you imagine the irony of poverty stricken people dying from the very thing they fight tooth and nail to get a drop of – water! But this is not just water, it is an ongoing state of intense floods that have left us devastated and mourning. Mathare Slum in Nairobi is indeed a good example of the structural violence of capitalism and the inequality it perpetuates.

Over the decades, many of our relatives in the village have been forced to pack up and move to urban slums like Mathare so as to sell their labour in the busy city and secure their survival. They can no longer depend on rain fed agriculture to survive in the village as was the norm hitherto because of increasingly unreliable weather patterns. Imagine a peasant who relocated to Mathare with his or her family because of changing climate patterns in the village, only to be among the over forty people that lost their lives during last week’s deadly floods in Mathare. As we write this, media reports indicate that the ongoing heavy rains and floods have not only destroyed crops but also swept away over five thousand heads of livestock across the country. What a tragedy for our people – they who are everyday exploited, abused, unheard and unseen by systems of power!

It is more than clear that our generation is doing worse than our parents’ generation. Our parents often narrate how they had plenty of food growing up, how they were able to access education from proceeds of farming, and how life was generally easier then. They narrate how a few decades ago, one could accurately predict when the rains would start and then prepare for the planting season accordingly. They find today’s weather patterns unpredictable and confusing. Being religious, most of them pray and hope that these conditions will one day change.

Our backward politicians, meanwhile, have been advising Kenyans to move to higher grounds in order to avoid death from flooding. Their prescribed cure to this crisis is to sign more climate declarations and to set aside disaster management funds to compensate victims.

The evangelists on the other hand have been calling on the nation to repent because the floods and the accompanying destruction and death are signs of fury from the ‘all loving and merciful’ saviour from above who we have forsaken.

In the midst of all this madness, Jecinta and Mama Victor breathe no more. Like countless others, our comrades are victims of a system that betrayed them and their aspirations.

These floods – which came after a period of extremely high temperatures, an El Niño and a prolonged drought in the country – call for an understanding of the capitalist response to the climate crisis and to advance a pro-poor people approach to deal with the crisis.

The First Africa Climate Summit

The first Africa Climate Summit held in Nairobi in September 2023 brought together 18 African heads of state, other leaders from across the world including the Secretary General of the United Nations, the President of the European Commission, corporate representatives and activists in a bid to shape climate commitments, pledges, and outcomes. The summit leaders called for global financial reform to increase renewable energy sources and even proposed a carbon tax. Mainstream media hailed the summit as a silver bullet to Africa’s climate crisis, while western countries applauded it and called for more collaboration.

While the African Climate Summit garnered significant attention, it concurrently prompted reflections on capitalist responses to climate change and the frames of organising that now characterise environmental struggles and activism in which many young African people and movements participate in with vigour.

Africa is one of the regions most adversely devastated by climate change, even though its citizens barely contribute to carbon emissions and global warming when compared to people and corporations in the global north. The marginalised, low-income communities and indigenous populations often bear the brunt of climate-related disasters and pollution.

In a pattern similar to the events of last week, many poor people lost their lives while countless others were displaced by flash floods resulting from intense rainfall associated with the El Niño weather pattern in 2023. These floods had been preceded by a prolonged drought which had resulted in a record number of casualties among people and animals. What were once occasional droughts occurring every five to ten years now manifest every two years, while climate change today causes more elephant deaths in Africa than poaching. It must be clear to all of us that climate change has transitioned from being just another threat to an undeniable reality that poses  an imminent danger to all species.

Governments and agencies across the world are today playing ping-pong games with these realities that confront our communities on an everyday basis. Their responses to the climate crisis have largely comprised market-based solutions that only help to intensify capitalist expansion. Most will agree that efforts taken to address the ecological crisis are always welcome. But, to truly address this crisis, we must recognize the connection between environmental concerns and broader socio-economic and political contexts.

There is a tendency to address the climate crisis in isolation, or as a unique struggle, using a narrow form of activism that relegates other major issues which affect the world – and especially countries in the periphery – to secondary questions. One crucial aspect of this compartmentalization is its connection to neoliberal capitalism, an economic and political ideology that emphasises market-oriented policies, deregulation of the state, and privatisation to protect monopoly capital, which is at the very centre of environmental pollution. As Chico Mendes once pointed out, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”  

Neoliberalism has played a significant role in shaping environmental policies globally over the past few decades, often prioritising profit over our planet. While ostensibly focused on environmental issues including funding for climate action, the 2023 African Climate Summit cannot be disentangled from the neoliberal undercurrents that influence policy decisions which benefit corporate capitalism and imperialism. Chico Mendes’ poignant statement [above] highlights a crucial dimension of the environmental discourse, it reminds us that the struggle to achieve ecological justice does not exist in a vacuum.

The environmental problems that confront us are not isolated from economic and social structures; they are deeply intertwined. Revolutionary environmentalism and activism must therefore today also engage with the fundamental issues of inequality, exploitation, and power relations. Focusing solely on environmental concerns without addressing the underlying class struggle leads to superficial solutions that fail to challenge the structures and systems that perpetuate environmental degradation. The countless summits and their vague commitments are a testament to this. Mainstream media owned by the global minority, the 1%, is an active accomplice in this scheme. That is why they hailed the African Climate Summit as a silver bullet to Africa’s climate crisis. Their logic ignores the science on climate change, feeds us lies about the climate crisis and advocates for green capitalism. The political class and the corporate media it owns still live in this state of denial because corporate profits are more important to them than our people and planet.

Common displays: A few fallacies within our struggle for Climate Justice.

The Nairobi Declaration, which was signed during the African Climate Summit, demanded for better financing to enable the African continent to tackle climate change – and carbon trading was put forward as one of the mechanisms of attracting climate finance. Carbon trading, however, is an artificial market where big polluters buy permits that enable them to continue polluting. In this scheme, countries and businesses are given voluntary pollution quotas and are allowed to sell ‘carbon credits’ to each other. [1]. This false solution to cutting emissions was introduced within the United Nations(UN) climate negotiations so as to promote pro-corporate solutions and to avoid regulatory measures that could potentially restrict pollution. Terms like ‘carbon pricing’ and ‘net-zero’ were then popularised by the World Bank to include carbon trading (cap-and-trade and offsets), carbon taxes, and voluntary carbon market schemes.

Furthermore, one of the most perturbing issues in the contemporary climate struggle is the recognition and inclusion of indigenous peoples in finding solutions to address environmental crises. Indigenous communities have historically been at the forefront of environmental protection for centuries, often with traditional knowledge and practices that are anchored on symbiotic relations with the environment and which offer sustainable solutions to the climate catastrophe. Yet, these communities have faced frequent attacks from multinational corporations that seek to drive them out of their indigenous land for agribusiness, mining or oil drilling – as was the case with the Amazon Forest in Brazil and which got Chico Mendes assassinated in 1988, or the eviction of the Maasai people from their ancestral land by the Tanzanian government so as to create room for game hunting.

Closer home, Amina Hussein, a Community Organizer from Korbesa settlement in Isiolo(Kenya) was assaulted by police and arrested together with her 3-year-old baby on the 11th of May 2023 and handed punitive bail terms of 1.5 million Kenyan shillings (approximately $11,100) or a bond of 2 million shillings. She was charged with 7 counts of trumped-up charges ranging from inciting violence, assaulting heavily armed male police officers, and stealing 350 bags of cement from Northern Rangelands Trust(NRT) offices. Amina’s only crime was leading her community in protests against the forceful acquisition of their communal land by the NRT, an organisation that is involved in CONservation. Covering a geographical area measuring over 2 million hectares, the Northern Rangelands Trust benefits from the sale of bloody carbon credits and has negatively impacted local economies by replacing traditional grazing systems with commercial ranching models which affect food security and migration during droughts. Within the current framework, these corporations are brazenly stealing indigenous lands and committing human rights violations with the protection of the state in the name of climate change mitigation. 

Another display that re-emerged at the first Africa Climate Summit and which has become the norm with such gatherings is the selective authorisation of protests. While protests demanding climate pledges are typically permitted, other protests against the high cost of living, corruption, extrajudicial killings, inequality, and other objective conditions within the same context are often met with heavy police repression. This differential treatment raises fundamental questions. If the objective is genuine change and social justice, then all forms of dissent should be treated with the same respect and consideration.

It is clear that protest on such occasions is only meant to sanitise the decay of liberal democracy.

Large swathes of the Global South are today experiencing an increase in ecological movements which have fallen into the endless merry-go-round of western-led, ineffective solutions to climate change. The efforts of these morally motivated ecological warriors remain insufficient in dealing with the climate crisis because they lack an understanding of the interconnectedness of this crisis within the neoliberal capitalist framework, a concrete understanding of the concrete conditions. Pro-poor people political organizations must thus never isolate themselves from the ecological movements. They must infuse class consciousness within these movements so that these movements stop looking for solutions to the climate crisis within the capitalist system. They must additionally initiate campaigns to create environmental consciousness among the masses, for a social consciousness without ecological consciousness will inevitably be corrupted and fall apart[2].

We must continue to demand that those parts of the world that have historically benefited from fossil fuels in the process of their industrialization should not only reduce their emissions but also contribute resources in the form of reparations for climate injustice and for the mitigation of climate disasters in underdeveloped countries. It is additionally imperative that indigenous perspectives are not only acknowledged but actively integrated into climate initiatives in a concrete manner, and not as a sign of patronage.

However, even as we advocate for these actions and campaigns, we firmly believe that capitalism lacks the will and capacity to address climate change. The interventions and strategies that it proposes are ineffective and can only help to push humanity to the very brink of a planetary annihilation. Resolving this crisis necessitates a comprehensive transformation of social and economic life on a global scale, it requires a centrally planned economy devoid of the profit motive.

An ancient Kikuyu proverb states that;  Rigita thi wega; ndwaheiruio ni aciari; ni ngombo uhetwo ni ciana ciaku (You must treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It is loaned to you by your children.”). This proverb – which summarises the African conceptual foundation of our values that sustain the ecological system – resonates with us today more than ever.

Rest in Peace Mama Victor. Rest in Peace Jecinta Adhiambo.