[ By: Charles Onyango-Obbo ]
The Haitian government recently confirmed that the death toll from the earthquake just over two weeks ago was 150,000. This figure, however, is set to climb.

If Haiti were China, tragic as it is, that number would still be peanuts because the country’s population is 1.3 billion. For Haiti, though, with 9,780,064 people, the death toll so far is 1.5 per cent of the population.

A better way to understand this is that if 1.5 per cent of Kenya’s population had been killed in the 2008 post-election violence, we would have had 585,000 deaths, not the official figure of 1,360.

Where there is death, there is sorrow and, almost inevitably, controversy too: For example, who or what was the real killer? In the case of Haiti, there is the right-wing American preacher, the Rev Pat Robertson, who has stirred the hornet’s nest.

Robertson blamed the Haitian earthquake on what, he alleged, is the country’s “pact to the devil”. Voodoo is big in Haiti, and even in regular church services, voodoo practices often intrude in the proceedings.

The Haitians “were under the heel of the French…,” Robertson said on his “700 Club” broadcast the other week.

“And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’

“You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other,” Robertson claimed.

Robertson’s “true story“: Haiti “swore a pact to the devil” to get “free from the French” and “ever since, they have been cursed“

The Haitians defeated French colonists in 1804 and became the first colonised black nation to become independent, but its last 50 years have been among the worst a country can suffer.

It was governed by some of the most incompetent, corrupt and cruel rulers in the world, the Duvaliers, father and son.

Robertson has got a lot of stick since then. I, too, think he was wrong, but not because of his claim that the earthquake was Haiti’s punishment for its devil worship.

Rather, because he didn’t appreciate that the destruction of a country often presents it with its best chance to rebuild as a modern society.

Take the example of Sudan, after the Nairobi peace agreement between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement rebels ended the war there and established a semi-autonomous administration in the south.

Southern Sudan had fallen back into the Dark Ages, and didn’t have an economy, a school system, or a phone system.

Experts who came in to advise with building a phone system thought southern Sudan had an opportunity to build a whole new digital system, unencumbered by the old regime with its poles, copper wires, transformers and giant exchanges. That would be cheaper, and could be built very quickly.

The SPLA’S former commander, who was in-charge of infrastructure was suspicious, thinking they were con men.

Having spent all the years fighting in the bush, he didn’t understand much about things like mobile mobiles, and he wanted something that people could see and touch ? telephone poles and lines. In the end, common sense prevailed.

After the 1979 war in Uganda that ousted military dictator Idi Amin, the capital, Kampala, and many towns in the west lay in ruins. It seemed impossible then that the country would rebuild all that had been lost.

Eventually it did, providing an opportunity to replace unworkable 70-year-old houses that would have taken another 50 years to tear down, and build new ones in their places.

Rwanda was the same. After the war and genocide in 1994, travelling around the country, you were left with a Robertson-like impression that it had been punished by God for some past transgressions. Everything had been wasted.

Rather than recreate the old telephone system, Rwanda became the second country after South Africa to have a mobile phone system on the continent.

That, in many ways, eventually led to the decision by Rwanda to become East Africa’s digital technology capital. In another two years, for example, the whole country will be a hotspot.

It also allowed Rwanda to become probably the first country in Africa, to rationalise the way peasants built their homes and used land in the villages.

The earthquake offers Haiti an opportunity to get rid of slums no politicians could touch because it would lose them votes; and to build something almost no Third World has been able to do ? a new sewer system.

This is no comfort to the Haitians who are suffering today, but their grandchildren might inherit a better country and a modern Port-au-Prince, because of the tragedy of the earthquake. The earthquake might well have been God’s work.

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

————————————————————————————————————————————————-