Introduction
African cities are those that have experienced a vertiginous boom in population growth over the last fifty years. Projections suggest that the proportion of urban dwellers in Africa will reach 58.9% by 2050. While this urbanisation is detrimental to economic health in that it accounts for around 30% of GDP growth per year and capita, it should be noted that data on environmental health is a marker of the quality of urbanisation. In Africa, unlike much of the rest of the world, one aspect of urbanisation whose damaging effects are known prosaically is the poor quality of the air outside; bad air is a silent killer whose voracity is poorly estimated. In this article, we propose to take a look at the issue by presenting the limitations of our systems that contribute to this state of affairs, as well as the potential risk this poses to us as individuals.
Air quality control in our cities: a cliche that speaks volumes about how our states are managed.
Like our development situation, cities in Africa and the rest of the Third World are still struggling to reconcile economic objectives with sustainable development. Our countries are not doing enough to ensure that the challenges of industrialisation are matched by those of human security, which is supposed to be at the very heart of this industrialisation – a paradox! Because others before us have begun to degrade the climate, and because of our geographical location, we are bearing the brunt of the effects.
Our governments, bound by economic performance obligations, are neglecting this issue in several respects by failing to set up effective legal instruments, or when they do exist, they suffer either from the lack of quality human resources to implement them or from the lack of appropriate control and measurement tools such as air quality control centres to ensure that we are up to standard. This explains why, while the references setting the rate of air emissions of fine particles, carbon oxides (COx) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the West are dropping cruelly year after year for motorised vehicles using fossil fuel sources, imports of second-hand vehicles that have become obsolete elsewhere are in full swing here. Other notable facts include the existence of anarchically located industrial complexes with uncontrolled discharges, domestic fires and burnt urban waste. In addition to this human pollution, there is particulate pollution in the air coming from the desert, which, combined with physical and chemical conditions such as high levels of permanent sunshine, keep the levels of particulate pollution in the air outside at a very high level (3 to 15 times higher on average than WHO standards) in sub-Saharan cities such as Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Niamey. A real disaster.
The air in our cities is a health and environmental issue that receives little attention.
Awareness of the problem of air quality is still slow to emerge. Although it has long been known that population flows encroach on the environment, our mobilisation seems very hesitant, to say the least, given the stakes involved. A recent study by Catherine Liousse, director of research at the CNRS, revealed that of the 54 states that make up the continent, only 19 have appropriate air quality monitoring systems. This lack of access to information is a handicap that deprives our authorities of a decision-making tool. The consequences are obvious: According to this study, N’djamena is the most polluted city in the world, with levels of fine particles in the air around 17 times higher than the WHO standard. According to the WHO, this outdoor air pollution is responsible for several health problems, including an increase in chronic diseases such as asthma and cardiovascular disease. It has also been recognised since 2013 by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that airborne particles are oncogenic.
Conclusion
The demographic evolution of African cities is putting them to the test in terms of cleaning up their living environment. The air outside appears to be affected by our various activities, combined with the geography of our environment, which is characterised by high levels of sunlight, which is conducive to keeping particles in suspension in the wind, even at low speeds. The air envelope in most of our towns and cities is a poison in which we bathe, with all the health risks that entails. Faced with this, our authorities owe it to themselves to wake up to the alarm bells rung by researchers on this issue and to play an active part in setting up a reliable regulatory framework to guarantee people’s health. The priority of economic performance must be surrounded by ethics, because the economy must ultimately bring fulfilment to mankind, failing which the State will appear to be shirking its obligations. The idea is to make clean air a quality public good, as Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe, so aptly put it: “Clean air should be a fundamental human right and a necessary condition for healthy and productive societies”.
