THE ENERGY POVERTY OF OUR TIME IS AS UNACCEPTABLE AS THE SLAVE TRADE OF LATTER DAYS

It is a cold dark place in the basement which is about four meters wide, two meters tall, with a raised concrete bench which is half a meter high and a meter wide. The concrete bench forms a single unit with the walls, but encircles the four walls to form a half circle towards the door. A former drainage passage goes through the middle of the concrete bench to form the entrance into chamber. These are former slave chambers on Zanzibar Island. I am standing in the same room, part of a larger complex where as many as 6 million slaves passed through en-route to their final slavery destinations. Half of them died here before reaching their final destinations. They were captured in the main land, by either the Arab slave traders or sold by chiefs as prisoners of war or opposition. They would then be shackled, neck and feet and driven in caravans, carrying ivory sometimes, for thousands of kilometres to the coast. They were then packed up in crowded ships to the island where the slave market was located. It was in these rooms that nearly half of them died, they would do the toilet in the same 4 by 2 meters rooms for at least two months the dead or the dying would be thrown into the sea. Those who made it through the cellar ordeal would be flogged to test their perseverance and the strongest would go for the highest price!! This practice was acceptable, legal and at the time. Besides, the sultans, Arabs and local chiefs who controlled the trade, were respected and prosperous members of their society. Today we know that this was immoral, inhuman, evil and a terrible way for one part of our collective human society to treat another part of humanity in such barbaric ways. Unfortunately this was not the first time humans had acted like this; the Bible is ripe with stories of Egyptians who enslaved the Jews for centuries. Human history is littered with even more subtle human endeavours which were legal and morally accepted at their time, but have since then in time been

proven to not only be inhuman but total unaccepted including apartheid in South Africa, segregation in the United States, colonization of Africa and more recently in our time and neighbourhood, the gruesome Rwanda genocide. The whole world watched, seemingly doing nothing as one ethnic group pitched a blood bath which claimed nearly 1 million lives in just three months! Energy poverty today has emerged as something that is as equally unacceptable as the slave trade of latter days. In a world where the right technology and financial instruments exist, the poor continue to pay more for energy access than the rich. Lighting a kerosene lamp for four hours a night, has been found to be as harmful to humans as smoking two packs of cigarette every night. Yet as many as 80% of Ugandas population today (27 million people), uses kerosene lamps to do just that every night. The Energy poverty in Uganda is only a microcosm of over 1.3 billion people who do not have access to electricity (around 20% of the global population) and therefore rely on polluting kerosene lamps or candles for lighting and on expensive dry-cell batteries to power radios for communications (IEA, 2011). This is besides an even larger population estimated at 2.7 billion people who rely on traditional1 use of biomass for heating and cooking. In a world where, the required technology exists, where the poor are paying nearly twice as much as they would for this right technology, this not only as unacceptable, but immoral and as unethical as the slave trade of later days! As liberated citizens of the free world, we have the same right and duty as did Thaddeus Stevens and other slave trade abolitionists, Nelson Mandela and other freedom fighters opposed to apartheid, Martin Luther King and other racial equality proponents. Lets not to wait for history to judge us, as the slave traders, or apartheid perpetuators are judged today. The final defeat of slave trade was brought through legal, institutionalized and activist efforts and equally the final defeat of energy poverty will come through the same mechanisms. As citizens of the global world today, we stand before a huge door of opportunity where we can choose and empowered are to do the right thing; it is within our reach to share information on clean forms of energy such as solar lamps that cost half as much as poor households spend on toxic kerosene per year; on energy efficient stoves that can reduce the dependence of rural households by as much as 60%. It is in our reach as governments to put in place legislative and institutional frameworks to support the drive for energy access for all; as private business to innovate and bring to market products that cost less but provide energy solutions that are affordable, clean and sustainable; as non-profits to innovate new ways to reach the last bottom of the pyramid. This will not only liberate the poor, but also offer our own salvation as it also addresses key environmental challenges of our time including climate change and forest loss and degradation. By Robert Ddamulira, Kampala Uganda. Mob: +256(0)776 582 723 Email: jermain_dr2002@yahoo.com