Praying for rain

The head of state and his cabinet turned out Wednesday to join the mainly Muslim population of this impoverished desert country in prayers for nourishing seasonal rains to begin to fall. Following a call from Niger’s Islamic council, religious leaders, or Imams, led the worshippers - including President Mamadou Tandja - in special prayers conducted in the open air rather than in mosques. And mystical religious leaders, or Marabouts, encouraged worshippers to do away with their usual prayer mats and press their hands and foreheads directly on the dry parched earth for greater prayer success. “Given the situation in our country where we are short of rain, the Islamic Council calls on all the Imams across the country to pray from 9 a.m. in a collective prayer, to call on God The Almighty to bestow on our country a fertile rainy season,” said Mohamed Ag Ahmadou, vice-president of the Islamic Council of Niger in a statement. The people of vast Niger, located on the southern edges of the Sahara desert, are mostly subsistence farmers and herders whose livelihoods are dependent on rains that fall in one short mid-year season. According to the UN’s Human Development Index, Nigeriens are the poorest people in the world, with the lowest standards of living. Average life expectancy is 44 years and only 14 percent of the adult population can read and write. And things are just getting worse. Nigeriens are poorer today than 30 years ago, with most of the country barely existing on less than US $1 a day. Last year, successive years of drought and the combined after effects of a locust plague, resulted in widespread hunger. UN and international aid organisations launched emergency food distributions. By mid-April, the UN’s children’s agency UNICEF had helped over 50,000 child cases of malnutrition, of which 15 percent were severely malnourished - or so hungry their life was in danger. As desertification bites further into the arid nation each year, Nigeriens are once again waiting for the annual rains to fall, so that their crops will grow, and sparse vegetation can shoot to life and provide grazing for the animals. But many are getting anxious, because even in the difficult year of 2005 much of the country had received substantial rains by May. Although the national weather office has assured that this year’s so far light rains are the norm for this arid Sahel zone, residents of the small town of Kollo, some 35 km south of the capital, turned out in force on Wednesday morning to join the prayers. Above the sky remained blue and cloud free. “For the moment, we haven’t seen any signs of rain,” said Mayor of Kollo Moussa Soumana after the prayers were over. “But, God willing, it will arrive.” sa/ss/ccr