By Khalifa Hemed
Published May 8, 2018
It may sound like a sick joke when Facebook encourages users of the platform to mark ‘themselves as safe during the flooding in southern Kenya‘. Though the ‘southern Kenya’ description sounds ambiguous if not silly, floods resulting from a month-long of raining has killed more than 100 people, uprooted and broken street lighting poles, washed away food crops, brought down concrete-and-steel security walls, turned homes into oceans, washed away tarmacked roads and destroyed railway lines in Kenya.
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This is a big blow to a country that lacks disaster-preparedness systems, preferring to employ ad hoc approaches to disaster-management whenever the need arises. Like now. As motor vehicles stall on roads that have been turned into vast oceans with fast, furious and violent waves and residents of the capital, Nairobi and the surrounding areas of Kajiado, Machakos and Kiambu are turned into hapless, helpless and hopeless victims of nature, questions are being raised as to whether Kenyans living in the Information Age are any better than their counterparts of the so-called Stone Age era.
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) that offer humanitarian assistance in Kenya estimate that some 260 000 people, many of who were still ‘struggling to recover from the 2017 drought’, have been displaced.
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“This is a double tragedy for many communities,” says Abbas Gullet, Secretary General of the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) in a media statement issued in Nairobi on My 4. “I’m worried that these floods will push some people beyond the brink. We will be supporting people from 15 out of the 29 affected counties. These include ten counties that we have already been supporting through our drought response programme.”
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IFRC says the floods ravaging Kenya may also trigger or worsen outbreaks of disease such as malaria and cholera as water sources have been contaminated and 33 health centres destroyed along with homes, crops, irrigation systems and farm equipment.
“There are already active cholera outbreaks in five of the counties affected by floods. We fear that these outbreaks could worsen and spread,” said Fatoumata Nafo-Traoré, Regional Director for Africa at IFRC.
“We are also worried that once the rains subside, people may face an upsurge of mosquito-borne disease such as dengue fever, chikungunya and malaria. We need to act now to pre-empt these very real, and potentially very deadly threats,” says Dr Nafo-Traoré.
IFRC and Kenya Red Cross Society say they have launched an international emergency appeal for 4.7 million Swiss francs to provide shelter and settlement, health and nutrition, water and sanitation and food security and livelihoods support for 150,000 people.
