Two disasters have recently hit Kenya. On Wednesday, January 21st, the iconic Nakumatt Downtown Supermarket, located in the centre of Nairobi city, was gutted by a deadly mid-afternoon fire, which left some 29 people dead (as of today's count). Then, on Saturday evening (January 24), an oil tanker overturned at Sachang'wan -- somewhere past Nakuru (where, incidentally, Nakumatt has its Kenyan roots), in the vicinity of Molo -- in the expansive Rift Valley. Ordinary folk rushed to loot its deadly cargo. The tanker, and the contents that had spilled, burst into flames, killing some 100 people on the spot, and over 120 people as of today's count.
All this has prompted people of all walks of life to ask: Is Kenya prepared to cope effectively with the disasters such as we have recently endured? It is a rhetorical question, for the consensus seems to be that Kenya is far from prepared, though we should be. What remains at issue is whom to blame, but there is much agreement on even that; neither of which will stop me from expressing the following opinion. The government, it is argued by nearly all, is to blame.
Kenya (by which I mean the Kenyan government) is, in my view, far from being well equipped to respond to the variety of emergencies and disasters that are likely to occur in this country -- and that have indeed occurred in the past, and even the very recent past. What is more, its top leadership is patently far from being sufficiently sensitize and alive to the natural and human-caused dangers that are essentially waiting to happen.
The government should be both the first-order mitigator of disasters and first-order responder when disaster strikes, but its top leadership is apathetic and, in effect, disinterested -- except, it seems, in the opportunities for media attention which come in the wake of such events, and which they are driven to hog. Moreover, the National Disaster Operations Centre (NDOC) remains technically asleep. This has left the
Kenya Red Cross Society as the de facto and much-respected "government" in disaster-response situations all across the country.
There is much public educating to do to elevate the average Kenyan's disaster literacy to functional levels as far as emergencies and disasters go, but if there is no strong political will at top levels of government, this is not going to happen. NGOs can help in this, of course, but the government must provide the enabling environment and indeed lead from the front. It must not abdicate its constitutional responsibility to the governed.
One irony that many have commented upon is that, at the household level, the widespread practice of burglar-proofing our homes is itself a source of danger. It usually leaves no margin of safety should other kinds of disaster (such as gas-cylinder explosions or electrical fires) strike. The ever-present and much-felt need to protect our homes against burglary and the need to have a quick exit in the event, for example, of a fire within the home work at cross-purposes -- leaving us damned if we do and damned if we don't. That is to say, damned if we are not protected from burglars who come in the dead of the night, when we are most vulnerable; and damned if we have no quick escape route from in-house danger -- a route which the burglar might well exploit long before the other danger strikes. In fact,
cross-purpose prevention is all too common in real life, if you think about it. We will probably never eliminate all the contradictions inherent in the urge to simultaneously deal with danger from all known, let alone unknown, sources.
Let me give nine other examples of these cross-purposes:
(1) The deep-seated urge to use our eyes to see the commotion that’s suddenly around us (indeed, the explosion that has just gone off nearby), if only in order to “see what to do” in the name of safety, works at cross-purposes with the need to protect our eyes (the organ of our “sovereign sense”, as Foucault saw it) from danger. It is as though we instinctively ask: what is the point of this sovereignty if, at the most critical moment, we must not exercise it?
(2) The drive to escape from poverty works at cross-purposes with the need for safe shelter, the consequence being that millions end up in dwellings highly prone to fire hazards, the only ones they can afford.
(3) Inhabitants of flood-prone river- and lake-basins constantly plead for safety against floods, but will not abandon their ancestral lands to grabbers whom they fear will surely arrive the moment they leave (and how foolish would that make them look in the eyes of the grabbers, let alone their own forebears and heirs?).
(4) The desire to buy medicine which cures clashes with the inclination to buy medicine one can afford.
(5) The instinct to live a long and healthy life clashes – among the young and unmarried, driven by their own raging hormones and by culture – with the instinct to marry, even at the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS at marriage or soon after.
(6) The urge to stay safe at home (and how safe is that?) clashes with the human compulsion to be “around” -- to interact with others, doing what people normally do when in town, or the countryside -- even if it means ending up under a collapsing building or beside a suicide bomber.
(7) The urge to be sober clashes, in the minds of many, with the desire to be social; the need to say no, with the desire to keep friends.
(8) The urge to follow established rules of the game clashes with the drive to win and prosper.
(9) The call for safe building standards clashes with the goal of affordable (or even cheap) construction, which too often means economizing on safety.
Such cross-purposes, together with government’s failure to lead, are the principal root-causes of Kenya’s failure to manage disasters effectively. They are the reasons we are ill-prepared to respond to large-scale danger. We must remember, however, that disasters are, by definition, catastrophic or traumatic events that occur because we have not prevented or adequately mitigated them, or could not. Typically, major disasters are contingent events which, as Kohler notes, “have a low probability of occurring, but when they do they have devastating consequences.” He adds, importantly:
“Designing response structures for such events is a difficult task, particularly when public resources are low. Generally, a disaster occurs when the local emergency system’s means for managing and coordinating a response are overwhelmed and require outside intervention to succeed.”
The embarrassment for us here in Kenya is that, more than ten years since the August 7th 1998 bomb blast, we have not genuinely tried to establish (and have not in fact established) a response structure that would be seen to work within our means, and which external responders would appreciate whenever they had to be called in to help.
There is need for a strong emergency management authority in this country. It should probably be fashioned after
the original FEMA in the US, before it was emasculated and buried somewhere within in the Department of Homeland Security, following 911. The Kenya Red Cross Society operates largely along the same lines as
FEMA was originally intended to operate. This means that the Kenyan government has a home-grown example which it should not be shy to emulate and even to better.
If the Kenya Red Cross Society has been able to do so much with more limited resources, an authority reporting directly to the President and adequately funded by the government could do much more still – if led with passion and commitment, and with high standards of professionalism in its recruitment, planning and operations. NDOC, the official emergency operations coordination outfit seems to be preoccupied with futile paperwork and donor-funded consultancies. That will not do.
P.S: The second installment of "Is Kenya-Disaster Prepared?" will follow.
