After an unprecedented drought in four decades, torrential rains are falling on Kenya, plunging large parts of the country into chaos. On Monday, April 29, the rupture of the foothills of the Old Kijabe natural dam, located about a hundred kilometers northwest of Nairobi, killed 45 people, bringing the national death toll to 120 victims. The material damage is considerable. Broken bridges, washed out roads, destroyed houses… Around 200,000 people are affected by these floods, according to a still provisional assessment.
In neighboring Tanzania, the situation is just as dramatic. Coastal areas and the economic capital, Dar es Salaam, are partly underwater. The government counted 155 victims. Further north, Lake Tanganyika – the second largest body of fresh water on the continent – and its tributaries overflow. Burundi has nearly 100,000 displaced people.
Everywhere, the same scenes of desolation are repeated, showing the astonishment of families who, in the space of a few hours, lost all their possessions, sometimes some of their loved ones. Without any assurance to help them, at the mercy of humanitarian or government interventions whose funding is far from guaranteed. These climate disasters are not new. But their frequency and violence have increased.
In March 2023, in Malawi, Cyclone Freddy – the longest in meteorological records and one of the deadliest in this landlocked southern African country – struck populations who had been victims of two successive cyclones a year earlier, and for some of them still taking refuge in displaced persons camps. One crisis chases the other, leaving behind lasting after-effects, and in people’s minds the certainty that at any moment the nightmare could start again.
“The priority remains to save the bodies”
The psychological trauma caused by the brutality of these events, the feeling of vulnerability towards the future that they bring, are until now little or not at all addressed in response programs to climate disasters. “In an emergency and with the few resources at our disposal, the priority remains to save bodies, not minds”, summarizes Fabrice Weissman, head of operations for Médecins sans frontières (MSF) in Malawi at the time of Cyclone Freddy. At the French office of Unicef, Mathilde Lécluse makes the same observation: “The worsening of malnutrition and the appearance of epidemics, particularly cholera, are the two major risks linked to flooding and those on which we are focusing our interventions. »
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