Drought in the east, floods in the south: Africa battered by climate change 

Chokwe District, Mozambique – I have been reporting on climate change stories for nearly all of this month. It wasn’t planned – it just ended up like that. A routine deployment to Kenya saw me head to the Kenya-Somalia border in Mandera town for a drought story.

At the time, there was hardly any international news coverage on this drought in the Horn of Africa. I was not expecting anything dramatic. I was wrong. The drought is bad.

As soon as we drove to really remote parts of Mandera County, I started seeing signs that something was wrong.

The team drove past several dry riverbeds. The camels were thin. Then, we saw the communal graveyards where dead livestock had been dumped and burned.

I spoke to a local chief in Mandera, Adan Molu Kike. He was a quiet, unassuming elderly man who went out of his way to explain to me how devastating the recent drought is.

“Our animals started dying in July last year, and they are still dying,” he told me. Then, he asked what country I had come from. I told him Zimbabwe.

“Have you seen a drought this bad in your country?” he asked me.

We were moving with a team from the Kenya Red Cross Society. They were keen to show me more about how the drought was affecting communities.

Water was the biggest challenge. With several rivers dry, water had to be brought in every week from aid agencies. Some communities got water once a week. Others saw the water bowsers arrive twice a week.

There is usually a timetable. If you miss a delivery, that means no water until the next delivery. The water – brown in colour – also has to be shared with livestock.

I see pastoralist Mohamed Hussein dragging two containers of water he has just collected from the water bowser delivery truck. He looks tired and doesn’t look like he wants to chit-chat, but he indulges us.

“I had 100 animals, but now I have only 20 left … My crops in the field are dead,” he says.

We talk about the drought and water situation. He says three of his goats died the night before. He says it’s because of the drought.

Hussein insists on showing me the animals in his back yard. He drags one away and tosses the dead goat in a bush. I remember thinking that out here in the desert like Mandera, it’s survival of the fittest.

Yet, people can’t mourn for too long over dead livestock. He has to keep the few he has left alive or else his family goes hungry.

As journalists, we come into a country, file our reports and fly home. But some experiences stay with you. This drought story did.

I left Kenya and headed home, thinking my stint reporting on climate change stories was finished for at least a few months. I was wrong.

I got back home to learn that it’s been raining a lot. Some places in Harare, Zimbabwe, even had flash floods. I thought nothing of it – only that it was interesting coming from a very hot climate to a wet one.

Then, the next day, news started circulating about floods and very heavy rain in South Africa and Mozambique.

As journalists, we never really switch off, so I was keeping an eye on the floods in Southern Africa, but I didn’t expect to be deployed to another climate change crisis so soon.

A day or two later, the situation worsened, and I was heading to Mozambique.

Again, at the time, there wasn’t much in international media coverage about the floods in Mozambique. South Africa was getting more media attention at the time. So I had no idea of the scale of these floods.

I landed in Mozambique and went to a neighbourhood in the capital, Maputo, that was affected by floods.

I put on my gumboots and waded through dirty, smelly floodwaters in between people’s submerged homes. I was shocked – but nothing prepared me for what I later saw elsewhere in the country.

In Marracuene, I saw a huge toll gate submerged and road signs sticking out on top of the water along a major highway. The highway was now metres deep underwater.

Then, we got Xai Xai, the capital of Gaza province in the south. Swaths of agricultural land were underwater. Parts of Xai Xai city were submerged. Restaurants, shops and businesses in the city centre sat in water.

“Now, the water must go down first, and then, we must start cleaning,” Richard Sequeira, the boat captain who was showing me the devastation, said. “There are a lot of snakes and animals around. Maybe 45 days to two months, we will be out of our houses and living like this.”

He is right. It could be weeks before the water recedes and disappears. But there could be more flooding in the coming days or weeks.

Authorities in neighbouring South Africa’s Mpumalanga province have ordered people to evacuate from flood-prone areas immediately. The dam there is full and could start releasing water.

Mozambique is downstream. That means all that water will make its way to already flooded communities. An Al Jazeera reporting team could be back here again.