Media Blames ‘Climate Breakdown’ for Burkina Faso’s Dire Healthcare
Burkina Faso is a very hot, very poor country. This, you would have thought, would be enough to explain a severely substandard healthcare system, but not according to the Guardian
The ‘newspaper’ decided to invoke “climate breakdown” in a story highlighting the plight of a tragic young woman.
If your electricity grid is in a sorry state and, amid rapid urbanisation and the searing West African hot season, demand outstrips supply, there will likely be power cuts.
If on top of these ‘regular’ challenges jihadis have devastated the stability of the country, then nothing will be easy.
If you’re living in Guardian-world, though, those factors aren’t the important ones. Rather, the most important, in comparison to which all others pale in significance, is “climate breakdown”.
Once when visiting my home country I told a friend’s small son that I lived in Africa. His eyes lit up. “You live in Ouagadougou!” My friend told me that his son was joking. He didn’t know that there was a place called Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.
How his eyes widened when I told him that yes, I really did live there.
It’s warm in ‘Ouaga’. The coolest month for the averaged 24 hour temperature is January. Outdoors, at the coolest part of the night (around 5am), it gets down to 18°C. In West Africa, the ‘hot season’ is March to May; then the cooling rains begin.
As hot season advances, extreme dry heat turns to extremely humid heat. By the time May arrives you’re thoroughly baked; the average daytime maximum will be 40-41°C, but in May the humidity means that your body will perceive the temperature as around 48°C. That’s outside, and in the shade.
Burkina Faso is far from wealthy. Situated on the edge of the Sahara Desert and with limited natural resources, its main export is labour: a few million work in neighbouring Ivory Coast.
The country has the dubious honour of sitting at number one on the Global Terrorism Index, with millions of internally displaced people, a significant percentage of its population. With typical struggles after independence, corruption and poor security, in recent years it has had two military coups.
The Government is in an acute, years-long struggle to establish control of the territory and much is in the hands of vicious killers. Foreign governments formally recommend you visit none of the country for any reason.
The challenges of jihadism have accelerated the ongoing pan-African trend of urbanisation. With high demand and limited resources in a small country, inevitably much construction is based on the principle of quickly throwing up whatever concrete edifice the limited funds will allow.
Insulation, planning, affordable air conditioners? No. You can sleep outside: but the growing concrete releases more heat there at night every year too.
The struggles of a healthcare system in a country with these challenges are huge. To give you some examples: there are just two or three cancer doctors in the entire country, who will generally prescribe an identical treatment regime to everyone, and they may be away this month.
There’s no accountability if anything goes wrong. Pregnancy and childbirth can be lethal to an extent that the West knows nothing of. Ce n’est pas facile, as the universal saying goes.
People die in private hospitals due to a mix of inadequate training, no accountability or consequences for mistakes, corruption and prevailing culture (mostly a blend of animism and relaxed Islam, with traditional superstitions mixing with a strong dose of fatalism).
I remember sitting with a young father who was persuaded to accept and love his precious handicapped son, made in the image of God – only to see him killed when an unpaid nursing student put the feeding tube into his lungs.
That was in one of the best private hospitals. If you go to a government hospital in most of Africa – and especially in one of the poorer countries – then you know to expect a challenge.
In the hot season, which the Guardian article is concerned with, things are especially bad. Why? The Director General of the national electricity company, Sonabel, went on national television to explain.
From 2011 to 2024, demand on the electrical grid went up by 490 megawatts. During the same time period, investment added only 222 megawatts of capacity. Thirty percent of machinery was past its replacement schedule.
The average age of thermal generators is 19 years, and for hydroelectric generators, 25 years. The country relies on importing power from nearby countries, who also have their own rapidly growing demand.
In hot season the demand for power is much higher (fans, air conditioners, increased load upon refrigeration units of all kinds). Consequently, countrywide during hot season 2024, there were power cuts for around eight to 10 hours a day (mostly in continuous blocks, which I believe to be unofficial rationing), and sometimes 14 hours.
Now imagine what it’s like in an poorly-staffed, under-resourced government hospital, with no air conditioners, fewer fans than beds, illness and sickness or pregnancy taking a toll on the body, and now frequent power cuts that go on for large chunks of the day?
Can you really imagine that?
In the Guardian’s piece, a 36 year-old woman passes through her first pregnancy during the brutal 2024 hot season without power. She is mostly seen at the government Yalgado hospital.
She suffers terribly. In the end she loses her baby to a miscarriage, and feels very alone, feeling helpless against the situation of brutal heat, lack of equipment and staff who can’t help or explain. “This,” the Guardian informs its readers “is climate breakdown.”
The regular hot season is re-branded as “heatwaves” and the article describes the problem as being something fundamentally to do with using ‘fossil fuels’. ‘Fossil fuels’! Those things which, if Burkina Faso had them more abundantly and more cheaply, would actually have provided working fans and air conditioners and saved many lives.
I am seething.
If you re-read the article carefully, you may well, like me, get the impression that the unfortunate lady herself most likely said nothing about climate breakdown, and it was the Guardian that shoe-horned that narrative in, getting a few token words in response to its prompting near the end. “I didn’t know if it was climate change or what.”
“This is climate breakdown.” No – this article is corruption. I don’t mean local corruption, but irresponsible foreigners with their own agendas, pushing their ‘climate breakdown’ political narrative whilst pretending to care.
Shame on you, Guardian, using suffering people for your own ends like this.
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So many idiots, it seems an impossibility to educate any of them.
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