The Independent UKThe great drought: Disaster looms in East Africa
written by Daniel Howden reports from Marsabit, Kenya
Saturday October 3, 2009
On the plains of Marsabit the heat is so intense the bush seems to shiver. The leafless scrub, bleached white by the sun, looks like a forest of fake Christmas trees. Carcasses of cattle and camels are strewn about the burnt red dirt in every direction. Siridwa Baseli walks out of the haze along a path of the dead and dying. He passes a skeletal cow that has given up and collapsed under a thorn tree. A nomad from the Rendille people, he is driving his herd in search of water.
He marks time in seasons but knows that it has not rained for three years: "Since it is not raining there is no pasture," he says. Only 40 of his herd of sheep and goats that once numbered 200 have survived. Those that remain are dying at a rate of 10 every day.
Already a herder before Kenya's independence he has never seen a drought like this.
"If I was young I would go to look for cash work. I am old. I may just die with my animals."
Across East Africa an extraordinary drought is drying up rivers, and grasslands, scorching crops and threatening millions of people with starvation. In Kenya, the biggest and most robust economy in the region, the rivers that feed its great game reserves have run dry and since the country relies on hydropower, electricity is now rationed in the cities.
And yet, it is in the semi-desert on the southern fringe of the Sahel zone where the most dramatic changes are being felt. Droughts are nothing new here and the nomadic way of life where herders follow patchy rains across the seasons developed centuries ago as a response to precarious natural resources. The herds of cattle, sheep, goats and camels – which are venerated by the nomads – were built up in the good years to pad the margins of life when the rains failed. But this way of life is being overwhelmed, even the camels are dying of thirst.
Naibari Arara lives in a typical Rendille village, a broad circle of domed shelters ringed by a barricade of thorny branches or bomas. Inside there are corrals for the animals on whom life depends and huts fashioned from hides, rags and sticks, designed to be collapsed, packed and rebuilt in a single day.
But the village doesn't move anymore. The animals are gone and so are the men. They left 12 months ago with the herds in search of pasture, she explains. In the meantime the women and children wait.
"We can't leave from here. We can't move without milk." The Rendille have survived for generations on a diet of milk, blood and occasionally meat. Now they are living on food stamps and milk powder. "When I was a young girl we would move every two or three months but now there are no rains. I cannot explain this."
An hour's walk away in the town of Korre, Rendille elders have been discussing the crisis. Monte Wambile, reed thin with a weather-beaten face says that what's unfolding is not a drought. According to folklore, a climatic disaster struck the same region about 120 years ago and is remembered in the local language as the "arbah", or catastrophe. Starving families were forced to sell their children in return for cattle to survive.
Now, he says it has returned.
"Since I was a young man the droughts would come but these were just changes we could cope with. Now there are carcasses all over and most of the people have lost their animals. Soon the people will start dying." Sariticho Lenelo is already dead. A 10-year-old Rendille boy in Loglogo, he was killed along with two young men when armed raiders attacked herders at the town's water pump and stole nearly 300 livestock.
Across the north of Kenya competition for water, grazing land and surviving cattle has sparked ethnic conflict. Cattle raids were always a feature of nomadic cultures but as the battle for survival intensifies the death toll climbs. Sixty-five people have been killed in the Turkana region alone since January. Despite being a disaster three years in the making, the drought is in danger of catching Kenya and the UN unprepared. Failed harvests mean high food prices, the national government is crippled by infighting and corruption, and international aid groups have seen funding squeezed by the credit crunch. The food vouchers sustaining hundreds of Rendille families will run out in less than a fortnight as the Irish aid agency paying for them, Concern, has run out of money for the project. In the last week, other big organisations such as Oxfam and Cafod have launched emergency appeals. The UN has received less than half the £350m it has called for.
In reality no one can deliver the rain that is really needed. Leina Mpoke has been working to unravel the cycles of drought, local deforestation and global influences for the Kenya Climate Working Group. "The drastic changes we're experiencing cannot be explained by local activities," he says. "Across the southern Sahel we're seeing a huge trend."
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