The Wisdom of Mama Wambui

“I was born on a day when God was sick, and seriously sick,” wrote the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, and so does Mama Wambui, an elderly woman living in the Mathare Valley slum in Kenya. After floods washed away her home and she contracted malaria, she has nothing left. President William Ruto has promised that all those who suffered from the mafuriko makubwa (the heavy rains) will not be left alone, but the times of politics are not the times of people. Climate change continues to cause disasters throughout East Africa, a region that experts point out contributes minimally to CO2 production. Yet it is precisely here that the most serious situations occurred between 2020 and 2022 and now the rains are 140% more than normal.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), around three million people have been affected by the floods. Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are paying the brunt of this disaster, closely followed by Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania.
In Kenya alone, floods have killed at least 257 people and 300,000 have suffered damage from torrential rains. In the capital Nairobi alone, more than 163,000 residents have been evacuated.
The situation is not much different in neighboring countries, where the El Niño meteorological phenomenon, which began in mid-2023, is set to last and accentuate climate change. Tanzania has recorded 155 deaths due to floods and landslides, in Burundi around 96,000 inhabitants have been displaced and Uganda has also been hit by strong storms. A report by Human Rights Watch notes that the Kenyan government has not taken adequate measures to avoid these disasters, which have hit the poor neighborhoods of the capital Nairobi the hardest, which are more fragile and congested, with less solid buildings and extremely poor sewage and water services.
The impact of the floods is profound, with long-term implications for livelihoods, infrastructure and mental health. And as the scale of the catastrophe widens, anger against the government is growing.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed his “deepest anguish at learning of hundreds of lives lost in the heavy floods.”
Finally, after listening to a meteorologist explain on TV that the rain was intensified by El Niño, the westward push of warmer waters from the Indian Ocean and the underlying trend of global warming caused by more industrialized countries, Mama Wambui said: “It is not God who is sick, but us.”

Fabrizio Floris
NP June/July 2024