Climate change a big blow to Tanzania economy

Experts say the ice on top of the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro will vanish come the year 2020


TANZANIA has several  world famous natural attractions and  one of  them is the Kilimanjaro Mountain which is highest mountain in Africa, located in northeast of the country near the Kenyan border.

The Kilimanjaro Mountain is said to be 5,891.8 metres high (19,330 ft).

“Tanzania the land of Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar and Serengeti is what President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete boasted when launching the first Ever TV campaign in New York  in 2007.

But climate change may change all this because, tourists do not flock to Moshi, where the mountain is located just to see how high it is, but  also to witness its glaciers in the heat of the scorching  sun of East Africa.

The glaciers are now vanishing  fast  and experts say that  the mountain has lost 82 percent of its ice since 1912 when  they were first measured.

According to the leading campaigners to salvage the situation, “the air at the summit is getting drier, reducing the snowfall that replenishes the ice and reflects solar radiation.”

Nicholas Pepin from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues put the blame on deforestation. They say Between September 2004 and July 2008, the team took hourly humidity and temperature readings at 10 elevations on the mountain.

“These revealed that daytime heating generates a flow of warm, moist air up the mountain side.

According to a Tanzanian senior government official, an average of 91,000 hectares of forests is illegally felled each year in the country.

While that much of trees is felled, its only 20,000 hectares of trees that are planted to bridge up the gaps.

Trees are mainly felled for illegal exports and firewood production  making the country lose between30,000 hectares and 500,000 hectares of forests a year.

The tourism sector earns  Tanzania about 17.5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and nearly 25 per cent of total export earnings, making it second foreign exchange earner after agriculture.

But if current climatic conditions persist, tourism sector will cease to be the second foreign exchange earner after agriculture.

That will be the case because the legendary glaciers, icing the peaks of Africa's highest summit for nearly 12,000 years, could be gone entirely by 2020. The mountain will no longer be the seventh wonder of the world.

Will the internet kill newspapers?

ARE newspapers as we know them today, going to vanish one day?  It is important to ask ourselves this question due to the tough competition it has.  First it was the radio, but now  there is television and the internet.

The internet has everything. It combines newspapers, radio and anything you can think of and it has made the world look like a village. At the click of a mouse, you can read any paper in the world that is online..

You can listen to various radios in the world and above all chat with friends and other people as if they are sitting just next to you! The entertainment world  has not bee spared too. There are various websites for sports and entertainment. The you tube for instance has put  the last nail in the coffin of  Cinema industry after the introduction of  videos.

So what is the future of our newspaper industry? The future looks as Rupert Murdoch pointed out. We have to do something, we have to change and I agree with Rupert Murdoch,  na Australian-American media magnate and the founder, Chairman, and CEO of News Corporation that our papers  must now be the destination.

Bloggers are  increasingly replacing editors, news correspondents and even writers as information experts, thus some of them have huge followers. Some bloggers are so popular that people turn to them for any breaking news. In the case of Tanzania, Issa Michuzi’s blog beats even beat the main stream media websites looking at the number of people who visit  his blog.

As Murdoch rightly pointed out  we need to change our approach. Said Murdoch: “We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.”

We have to invest on  online papers or media websites which will be destination in the sense that readers have to be linked to read  those online papers or media websites.

Again I agree with Murdoch that  we need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.

In that case therefore we have to have online papers and websites which are reader friendly or presented in an attractive way that  provokes debate among the readers who visits them.

In this spirit, we’re now turning to the internet. Today, the newspaper is just a paper. Tomorrow, it can be a

Germany gets new defence minister

 

CHANCELLOR  of Germany, Angela Merkel has appointed one of her closest advisers to succeed Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who resigned as Germany's defence minister over a plagiarism scandal.

According to the Guardian (UK), Thomas de Maizière, Merkel's one-time chief of staff in the chancellery, moves from Germany's home office, where he has been interior minister since October 2009.

Guttenberg handed in his notice after being stripped of his PhD when it was found some of it was plagiarised.

De Maizière, 57, is considered a safe pair of hands for Merkel, whose Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) has suffered defeats in two key regional elections.

The Gurdian reported that she needs someone trustworthy to continue with Guttenberg's reform of the German army, which will see conscription abolished later this year.

The new defence minister is an experienced strategist who has politics in his blood – his cousin is Lothar de Maizière, who was the last prime minister of East Germany.

Thomas de Maizière began his own political career in 1983 working for the CDU mayor of Berlin, Richard von Weizsäcker, and worked his way up the party ladder, becoming Merkel's chief of staff when she was made chancellor in 2005.

Taking De Maizière's position in the ministry of the interior is Hans-Peter Friedrich, who is from the CSU, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's CDU.

As Guttenberg is a CSU politician, a top job had to be given to a member of his party under the coalition agreement. But Merkel wanted one of her own in the ministry of defence to ensure the planned reforms progress through parliament as smoothly as possible.

The chancellor was widely criticised over her handling of the Guttenberg plagiarism row. She continued to support her colleague through two weeks of front page stories over the authenticity of his thesis, leaving him to resign rather than bowing to pressure to sack him.

Tanzania editors online training

My name is Francis Chirwa. I am a journalist working with weekly newspaper, Raia Mwema which comes out every Wednesday.

I have been a journalist since  1983 after  completing my two year  Diploma Course in Journalism at the Nyegezi Social  Training Institute which is now St Augustine University.

I started as a sports reporter then  later became a sports editor before coming together with my fellow  journalist in 2008 to start  Raia Mwema,  which commands  big respect in media fraternity in Tanzania.

As I attend Tanzania Editors Online Training conducted by a Finnish journalist Peik  Johansson of  the Finnish Foundation For Media  Comunication And Development (VIKES), I hereby start my own blog to share with the people we have the same interest in sports, culture and politics.