Africa’s climate activists in the spotlight

constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offence.”

Collins, Alexander and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were playing an over-sized role in the final hours of debate with pointed questions ahead of crucial votes. Another Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, has made clear he will vote for witnesses.

Murkowksi drew a reaction during the debate when she asked simply: “Why should this body not call Ambassador Bolton?”

Alexander of Tennessee captured attention just before the dinner break when he questioned partisanship in the proceedings thus far.

In response, Democrat Zoe Lofgren of California, a congressional staffer during Watergate and now a House prosecutor, told the senators that the Richard Nixon impeachment also started as a partisan inquiry.

A bipartisan consensus emerged only after Republicans – including staunch Nixon supporters – saw enough evidence to change their minds, she said.

“They couldn’t turn away from the evidence that their president had committed abuse of power and they had to vote to impeach him,” Lofgren said.

Nixon resigned before he was impeached.

While disappointed that House Republicans did not join Democrats in voting to impeach Trump, she said the Senate – “the greatest deliberative body on the planet” – has a new opportunity.

Trump was impeached by House last month on charges that he abused his power like no other president, jeopardising Ukraine and Us-ukraine relations.

Trump’s attorney Eric Herschmann declared the Democrats are only prosecuting the president because they can’t beat him in 2020. | AP

AFTER a racism debate in Davos on the invisibility of African climate activists, teen Swede activist Greta Thunberg held a press conference yesterday – with eco-warriors from Kenya, Uganda and South Africa – to stress the importance of their voices.

Vanessa Nakate of Uganda was at the heart of a viral debate at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland after she was cropped out of a news agency photo of young activists taken after a press conference.

A 23-year-old graduate in business administration, Nakate was the only black person and only African in the shoot. She accused the Associated Press of racism in cropping her out.

The agency said the photographer had modified the photo for composition purposes.

“We’re doing this press conference today so that people who need to be heard can share their stories to the media,” Greta told journalists at Greenpeace Sweden’s offices.

“Today we will be focusing on Africa as the African perspective is always so under-reported,” she added.

So far, Africa is essentially blameless when it comes to climate change. The continent is home to 17% of the world’s population and over a quarter of its nations, but accounts for only 5% of greenhouse gas emissions pushing the planet toward runaway warming.

Greta, who has become a household name since beginning her “School Strike for the Climate” in August 2018, said she would answer only a few questions before giving the floor to the African activists, who took part via a video link.

Nakate, on camera from Kampala, was the first to speak out. “This is the time for the world to listen to the activists from Africa and to pay attention to their stories. This is an opportunity for media to actually do some justice to the climate issues in Africa.”

Nakate, joined by Ayakha Melithafa and Ndoni Mcunu of South Africa, and Makenna Muigai of Kenya, then spent the next hour answering journalists’ questions.

Mcunu said: “Africa only contributes about 5% to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet we are the most impacted” by climate change. “Almost 20 million people have fled the continent due to these changes” and major droughts have caused “almost 52 million people to become food insecure,” said Mcunu, a PHD student at Joburg’s Wits University.

But she said that Africans have begun to adapt, using “indigenous knowledge systems”, incorporating “the knowledge that we have as Africans into the international research science and climate data awareness”.

“How is it that we’re not being spotlighted in these stories, that’s the main challenge we have as a continent,” she said.

Meanwhile, Greta has applied to trademark her name. The 17-year-old said the move was to prevent others exploiting her fame “for commercial purposes without any consent whatsoever”. The application also covers the name of her “Fridays For Future” school strikes movement.

She revealed plans to set up a nonprofit foundation to use her book royalties, donations and prizes to promote sustainability and raise awareness to mental health causes.

The phrase “for future”, made popular by the global Fridays For Future youth climate movement, was named as Germany’s Anglicism of the year. Anatol Stefanowitsch, the linguist who led the jury, made reference to Thunberg, who founded the movement, in explaining his team’s choice.

The fact that a Swedish native speaker used the English term, which then caught on worldwide, including in Germany, to refer to climate activism shows that the English language is now a global one and does not belong solely to traditionally English-speaking countries, he said. | Daily Mail dpa