KENYA-FOOD: Famine Alert Declared

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jan 29 1997 (IPS) - The government of President Daniel Arap Moi has declared a state of national disaster following warnings that hundreds of thousands of people were threatened by famine in Kenya.

The declaration, contained in a brief six-line statement, was issued here late Tuesday after a concerted campaign by aid agencies and church leaders as well as community leaders demanding that the government act fast to contain the scourge.

The statement, issued from the office of the president, said Moi had made the proclamation to allow the minister of finance to waive duty and value added tax on food like maize, milk and rice imported to feed starving people in drought-affected areas.

In a special news alert published here this week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said the Kenyan government estimated that the drought, which led to widespread crop failures and loss of livestock, could affect about three million people.

The FAO estimates that Kenya will need to import at least 1.3 million tonnes of grain in 1997, 200,000 tonnes more than the UN agency had previously forecast.

The decision to declare the famine a national disaster concided with a call to that effect, made Tuesday by 23 Catholic bishops in Kenya.

Archbishop Zaccaeus Okoth, chairman of the Kenya Catholic Bishops Conference, explained at a press conference here on Tuesday that acknowledging the disaster would enable church- sponsored aid agencies and international relief organisations to step in with assistance.

“This will save many lives and tragic human suffering,” he said .

Early this month, 11 legislators from the north-eastern province had appealed to the government to declare the arid region, which borders on Somalia, a disaster zone.

The legislators had told a press conference in the Kenyan capital that pastoralists in the northeast had already lost a considerable number of their livestock as a result of a prolonged drought.

The drought is most severe in the northeast, which has had little rain over the past three years and where people had relied heavily on relief food supplied by local and international agencies that worked in the area in 1992-1993 at the height of the civil war in Somalia.

To assist the northeast and other area affected by drought and famine, the government last week launched National Famine Relief Fund, for which it has earmarked 330 million Kenya shillings (Kshs).

(One U.S. dollar = 55 Kshs.)

On Tuesday, the Association of Local Government Authorities contributed 1,595,000 shillings to the fund, whose target is two billion Kshs.

Receiving the cheque from the association’s chairman John Kuria, Moi said that his government was doing everything in its power to avert the looming disaster. “My government is committed to ensuring no Kenyan died of hunger due to the current drought,” he said.

Last week the Kenyan leader ordered 15,000 bags of maize, the country’s main staple food, to be distributed to starving villagers in Ukambai, a district in the Eastern Province.

The drought is also affecting Kenya’s electricity supply, forcing the Kenya Power and Lighting Company to impose a tight regime of rationing.

The company’s managing director, Samuel Gichuru, was quoted by the latest issue of ‘The East African’ weekly as saying that hydropower generation had been reduced by about 80 megawatts, which, he said, would bring the total energy shortage in January and February to between 94 and 124 megawatts during peak demand periods.

“There was no option other than to conserve water by reducing the generation of hydroelectric power in order to get through the current dry spell,” Gichuru told ‘The East African’.

He said the effects of rationing might ease by April or at the latest by June, when a 43-megawatt thermal plant in the port of Mombasa, 460 km east of here, and a 44.5-megawatt diesel plant near Nairobi are to be commissioned.