/ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN 9/ KENYA: Controversy Over Dumped Toxic Waste

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Mar 23 1996 (IPS) - A cargo-load of leaking toxic waste has been sitting at Kenya’s port of Mombasa since December, with the authorities apparently unable to get rid off the stuff, and less than open over its composition.

“We don’t know anything about the cargos’s content,” a spokesperson at the Nairobi-based Environmental Liason Centre International (ELCI) says. “We don’t know whether it is loaded with pesticides or with something else.”

According to him, the Centre has been trying to get some detailed facts from Mombasa, the Indian Ocean port 500 km from Nairobi, but with little success.

“Like anyone else,” he says, “we have been getting our information about the cargo from the newspapers here.”

One of the dailies, ‘The Nation’, quoted a health officer at Mombasa as saying that about 65 percent of the cargo’s content is made up of expired Phenyl Mercuric Nitrate, used in the manufacture of pesticides, and originally came from Britain.

“The substance is highly toxic if it is inhaled or accidentally ingested. And it is very harmful to anyone who does not know or is not warned about the handling of such chemicals,” the officer said.

It took some pressure before the authorities moved the leaking load, weighing more than 30,480 kgs, away from stores close to the refrigerator block where food for export and import is kept.

Apart from the fear of food contamination, the choking fumes emitted from the containers, have also been blamed by workers for increasing cases of eye and skin irritation at the port.

All that is publicly known about the consignment is that it was rejected by Tanzania, where it was first shipped, and inspectors there ordered it to be returned to Britain for disposal.

Instead, it found its way to Mombasa in December. There it was off-loaded so that the ship, the ‘Barrister’, could pick-up fresh cargo. The Kenya-based shipping agent, Mackenzie Maritime, refused to return telephone calls made by IPS enquiring about the load.

Dr S.K. Shariff, the top medical officer in Mombasa, said the port’s health authority had recommended that the consignment be trans-shipped two months ago, but nothing was done.

The pesticide was stored as “transit cargo” waiting for another vessel to ferry it to Britain, but several shipping lines have rejected the load because of the stringent rules that apply in the Suez Canal over the movement of toxic waste.

Last week the Kenyan government gave the Department of Customs and the port authorities one month to get rid of the chemicals.

“I think it will need a lot of political pressure to bear on the companies in Tanzania and in the United Kingdom who are involved in the shipment of the chemical,” said Christopher Cox of the Nairobi-based Southern Network for Environment and Development (SONED).

“It will need President (Daniel) Moi to take up the case himself,” he told IPS.

“I also strongly believe that those companies must be made to pay for the cost and for the environmental damage they have caused in Mombasa,” he added. “Failing to pay, they should be taken to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the Netherlands.”

Cox, whose Network has branches in the Philipines, Latin America and Belgium, blamed the industrialised nations for their continued dumping of chemicals in the Third World.

“The Americans are doing it in Latin America, especially in Bolivia. And the Europeans are doing it in Africa,” he said.

According to Cox, industrial nations are also still selling toxic chemicals, like DDT, which have long been banned in Europe, to African countries. “It’s a mafia connection, which must be stopped.”