From drought to floods and the loss of life

A Czech model and television host Petra Nemcova, once said, "We cannot stop natural disasters, but we can arm ourselves with knowledge. so many lives wouldn't have to be lost if there were enough disaster preparedness."

Indeed, we should not be losing life to drought and floods as we have witnessed in the past weeks.

Virtually every year, we have some form of disaster, but we never learn from our past mistakes in handling them. Memories of the 2018 floods still linger. The rains, described as mini El Nino, affected 29 counties, left some 150 dead, displaced more than 311,000 people and injured 33. Although no estimates on property damage was given, it perhaps ran into billions of shillings.

This is happening at a time when weather data for predicting rainfall patterns is in abundance.

IBM's Watson computer has been very accurate in its predictive models. Just a few weeks ago, it predicted when it will rain in Kenya, and indeed it was correct. The company has the biggest network of data collection stations scattered throughout the World. It has built a capacity to provide accurate personalised and reliable weather data that is now used across the World.

Weather information is only useful if it can be used to adequately prepare for food production and for the mitigation of disasters.

LOCAL CAPACITY

To maximise on data to manage disasters, there is a need also to develop local capacities, especially in mapping out areas that are often impacted the most or where the forest has been depleted.

For example, the Narok area, where human settlement has dramatically depleted the forests, has become prone to extreme disasters. Last year, the roads were destroyed, and instead of putting contingency measures during repair work, contractors only resurfaced the road knowing very well that another torrential rainfall would similarly destroy it. That is what exactly happened last week.

Are there measures that must be taken to avoid continued selective amnesia in comprehensively dealing with disaster?

For a start, professional organisations like the Institution of Engineers of Kenya should deregister their members who fail to act responsibly in responding to natural disasters. We may not be perfect, but there must be a culture of continuous improvement to avoid recurrence of a catastrophe such as the one we witnessed last week in Narok area.

Corruption, which contributes to poor preparation and response, must also be comprehensively dealt with.

The tendency for reactive interventions and showmanship such as the behaviour of the Nairobi Governor delivering food to Turkana defeats the logic of building a sustainable solution towards risk reduction around disasters.

In essence, it is foolish to take advantage of the emergency to self-publicise. People are hungry as a result of our mutual destruction of the environment.

We also seem to forget too quickly to minimise risks. For example, when a couple of poorly constructed housing collapsed killing hundreds of people, the government appointed an inspection agency to rid the city of all vulnerable housing. The committee did its work by earmarking the housing to be pulled down.

To date, none of those buildings has been pulled down. They will tumble down one of these fine days when it rains, and we shall repeat the same exercise of digging through concrete slabs to reach trapped bodies.

It is pretty apparent that someone took bribe without thinking about the many people at risk in those condemned houses.

URBAN PLANNING

In spite of creating 47 governments to take services closer to the people, the term urban planning is foreign to more than 4,000 people elected and appointed to manage counties for a better future.

The neglect of towns and urban areas, complete with electoral disenfranchisement of the people, is the Achilles heel of devolution.

Yet, to minimise risk, these county governments must develop land use planning and zoning laws, and also respect such laws. No city grows sustainably without building codes and effective by-laws.

Without such measures, it is impossible to assess risk vulnerability and prepare for any disaster. Fires like the 2011 Sinai slums tragedy that killed 120 people was a result of poor planning. Those who would have run away simply couldn't.

Even in extreme poverty in slums, planning is the prerequisite for disaster preparedness. The government should create access roads that can be used to either escape or provide disaster response services, especially in urban areas. As for rural areas, by now we should be preaching to people living within land topologies that are vulnerable to landslides.

There is wisdom in training millions of unemployed youths in disaster preparedness and response. Far too many people are dying in capsizing boats in many of our waters while young people watch because they have no training.

The National Youth Service and the National Disaster Management Authority, as well as the Kenya Red Cross, should be at the forefront of training youth as first responders to disasters within their communities. Building capacity will minimise the severity of the risk.

By making continuous improvements to our disaster response and building capacity, the country will have developed sustainable disaster response measures such that we can avoid the movement from drought to floods and the loss of life every year.

The writer is an associate professor at University of Nairobi’s School of Business. @bantigito