The gut-wrenching stench of rotting flesh hangs in the air in this remote northeastern Kenyan village where the putrefying carcasses of cattle are a testament to a searing drought that threatens millions with starvation across east Africa.
It last rained here 14 months ago, but those showers were fast swallowed by the thirsty soil and there is little now but dust and dead animals covering the parched earth, leading to widespread fears of human famine.
“I had 100 cows four months ago, now I only have 15,” said Mohammed Yusuf, a 28-year-old herdsman who brought his surviving cattle to a dwindling carcass-infesting watering hole.
His emaciated herd jostle for sips of the brown water in troughs surrounded by dead cows in Arbajahan village west of the district seat of Wajir, one of Kenya’s worst-hit areas about 500km north of Nairobi.
“We have to walk hundreds of kilometers to get to this watering point,” says Yusuf, a father of four, who like many here is counting dead cattle every day and becoming increasingly if not entirely reliant on food aid.
“The land is completely bare, there is no pasture,” said Yusuf Ibrahim, an official with a local non-governmental organisation supervising relief operations. “This drought is completely unprecedented.”
Livestock health and mortality are key indicators of human conditions in this region, populated mainly by nomadic pastoralists who are feeling the brunt of the scorching drought.
Those indicators portend catastrophe, according to aid agencies who note that tens of thousands of cattle, goats, sheep and camels have perished because of the drought in recent months.
“Seventy percent of cattle have already died in Wajir district since the drought began,” said Brendan Cox of the British charity Oxfam.
The cattle deaths have raised fears of major inter-tribal clashes in the region where clashes over scarce water and pasture have been exacerbated by the drought.
At least 40 people, mainly children in Kenya’s northeast, have died of drought-related malnutrition and associated illness since December and the government has declared a national disaster.
On Wednesday, the Kenyan government and the United Nations appealed for more than $230-million (€192-million) in urgent donations to help 3,5-million Kenyans who need food aid to survive over the next 12 months.
Without the assistance, Oxfam said Kenya would likely face its “worst humanitarian crisis” since independence in 1963, noting that malnutrition rates in some areas were at more than 30 percent, twice the standard emergency level.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said without immediate donor response to the appeal, it would run out of food by next month.
In Arbajahan, the shortage of relief is acute and apparent.
Residents say only 2 000 of the village’s 15 000 people are receiving supplies, consisting of 10kg of dry maize and 600g of cooking fat every three months.
“We have no hope because the relief food is not enough, but we are surviving on the little we get,” said Ahmed Muktar.
But not all do and with the next hoped-for rains not due until the end of March, the situtation for the future looks grim.
Amina Isak recently lost a grandchild to diarrhoea that health workers say was likely due to drought-related unhygienic conditions around her hut where flies swarm over the carcasses of cattle.
“This drought has no comparison, I’ve not seen anything like it,” the septuagenarian said as she sat on a bed of sticks in her grass hovel.
“There are no health services here and no transport to go to the nearest hospital.”
At the Wajir district hospital, about 155km east of Arbajahan, officials say six children died last month alone due to the drought and the facility is filled to capacity.
The 18-bed pediatric ward has been overwhelmed by children suffering from severe malnutrition, many of whom have to be prematurely released to make way for others in dire need, they said.
“We have to discharge them even before they attain the right weight to create space for others,” said Ahmedin Omar, the district medical officer at the facility. – AFP