Covid Surge in Kisumu.

Queueing for Covid tests in Kisumu

 The pandemic is worsening in Africa as more contagious variants spread, vaccinations lag and hospitals in some places are pushed beyond their limits.

KISUMU, Kenya — Before Kenya’s president and other leaders arrived in late May to mark a major public holiday, health officials in Kisumu on Lake Victoria saw disaster brewing. Coronavirus infections were spiking, hospital isolation units were filling up and the highly contagious Delta variant had been found in Kenya for the first time — in Kisumu County.

Dr. Boaz Otieno Nyunya, the county executive for health and sanitation, said he and other health specialists argued and pleaded for the politicians to hold a virtual celebration and skip the mass, in-person events that can supercharge an outbreak. Just weeks earlier, huge political rallies had helped fuel the catastrophic Covid-19 wave in India, where the Delta variant first emerged and became dominant.

Their objections were waved away, the health officials said. President Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy President William Ruto, the former prime minister Raila Odinga and others descended on Kisumu, drawing large and mostly unmasked crowds who thronged the streets to watch their slow-moving motorcades through the city and gathered to hear them at marketplaces and parking lots.

(So can we blame the politicians who wanted publicity, for this surge in Coronavirus ?   Yes, sadly, I think we can .... but also the wananchi who surged in their thousands to see the politicians.   Much better to have cancelled the Madaraka Day celebrations for this year.)

With medical supplies depleted, vaccines scarce, doctors lamenting physical and mental fatigue and hospitals turning away patients for lack of beds or oxygen, health officials say they fear a wave like the one that ripped through India in April and May could be looming over Kisumu.

“The India example is not lost to us,” Dr. Nyunya said.

Though data on infections and deaths is spotty, more than 23 percent of the people tested for the virus in Kisumu last week were positive — more than double the national rate. Kenya’s overall positivity rate is similar to that of the United States when the pandemic peaked there in January. But the Delta variant was still rare then, the American health system is far more robust than Kenya’s and the U.S. government was ramping up vaccination on a grand scale.

All of Africa is vulnerable, as the latest wave of the pandemic sweeps the continent, driven in part by more transmissible variants. Fewer than 1 percent of Africa’s people have been even partially vaccinated, by far the lowest rate for any continent.

“I think the greatest risk in Africa is to look at what happened in Italy earlier on and what happened in India and start thinking we are safe — to say it’s very far away from us and that we may not go the same way,” said Dr. Mark Nanyingi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Liverpool in Britain. He called the surge in western Kenya a “storm on the horizon.”

Covid-related deaths in Africa climbed by nearly 15 percent last week compared to the previous one, based on available data from almost 40 nations, the World Health Organization said. But experts say the true scale of the pandemic far exceeds reported figures in Africa, where testing and tracing remain a challenge for many countries, and many nations do not collect mortality data.

To forestall the ongoing crisis, Kenya’s Ministry of Health last week imposed a restriction on gatherings and extended a dusk-to-dawn curfew in Kisumu and more than a dozen surrounding counties. But the measures were too late for Dr. Nyunya, who said that thinking back on the deliberations — which involved the county governor Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, a former national health minister — over the celebrations last month, “It makes you feel impotent.”

In Uganda, which borders Kenya near Kisumu and has announced record cases and deaths, President Yoweri Museveni has imposed a strict 42-day lockdown. Just weeks ago, Rwanda hosted the Basketball Africa League and other big sporting events, raising the possibility for a full reopening. But after a spike in cases, the government introduced new lockdown measures on Monday.

The Democratic Republic of Congo — where the virus has claimed the lives of more than 5 percent of lawmakers ­— is grappling with a third wave as it falters in rolling out vaccines. South Africa, the continent’s worst-hit nation, has reported new infections doubling in just two weeks’ time, with the sharpest increases in major urban centers. Tunisia, where hospitals are full and oxygen supplies are low, is enduring a fourth wave.

“New, higher transmitting variants create a precarious situation in many countries that have weak health systems,” said Dr. Ngozi Erondu, a senior health scholar at the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown University.

The W.H.O. attributes the surge in Africa to lack of vaccination, insufficient adherence to precautionary measures like mask wearing and social distancing and the Delta and other variants.

In Kisumu, health officials first detected the Delta variant in early May, in factory workers who had arrived from India. Since then, it has spread to neighbouring counties, with doctors saying patients were presenting more severe symptoms than they encountered earlier in the pandemic.

(From The New York Times)

Kenya Brings Lakeside Port Back to Life

Kenya’s determination to build a multimodal transport system to serve the east Africa region has been boosted by the launch of the Kisumu port that was refurbished at a cost of $30 million.

President Uhuru Kenyatta said the port will facilitate the growth of economies in the region because it provides a holistic transport network for goods along the northern corridor from the port of Mombasa to countries like Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, northern Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The revival of the port also involved the revamping of MV Uhuru, a wagon ferry, and the Kisumu Kenya Shipyard Limited, a state agency that will repair, refurbish and rehabilitate ships for use in Lake Victoria. The yard is also expected to embark on building another vessel, MV Uhuru 2, which will be used to ferry petroleum and petroleum products and other goods to neighboring countries. The port has also been equipped with forklift trucks, mobile cranes and tractor-trailers ready for imports and exports.

Also part of the newly commissioned facilities is a $4.3 million marine school that will train Kenyans and other East Africa nationals on the management of vessels and other marine activities.

“The revival of this port was informed by the need to revamp the economies of the East Africa region and beyond,” said President Uhuru.

Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania reckon that reviving the neglected and underdeveloped Lake Victoria transport infrastructure has the potential to generate $60 billion worth of trade annually. At present, it only generates $6 billion for the three countries combined.
The revival of the port in Lake Victoria creates a multimodal system involving road, rail and water. It will see goods entering the East Africa region through the port of Mombasa, transported via the standard gauge railway to Naivasha, and carried onwards to Kisumu through the rehabilitated meter gauge railway. Fuel tankers and cargo vessels will then ferry the goods to Uganda and northern Tanzania - countries that share the Lake Victoria shoreline - and can be transported onwards via road and train to other countries in the region.

The Lake Victoria port network also includes Mwanza, Musoma, and Bukoba in Tanzania and Entebbe and Port Bell in Uganda.

As part of the Kisumu port refurbishment, Kenya has invested $17 million to build the Kisumu oil jetty to facilitate easy transportation of petroleum products across the region and remove trucks from the road. Uganda has also contracted Mahathi Infra Uganda Ltd, a consortium of private investors, to build a $270 million liquid bulk jetty and accompanying infrastructure on its side.
“The revival of Kisumu port will improve Kenya's social and commercial relations with the neighboring countries and reposition Kisumu as Kenya’s frontier for regional trade and logistics,” said President Uhuru.

He added that with an international airport, a pier and a railway station, Kisumu will actualize the vision of deeper integration within the East African Community trading bloc.

(from 'The Maritime Executive')

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I do hope that this project goes ahead and is successful, and that they can keep the port area free of the floating and choking water hyacinth that has spread all around the lake.   There was a project to turn it into paper but I've never found out if this has gone ahead.  

Nyirogongo erupts

 

What an awful sight; a wall of lava rushing towards your house .... 

Residents in the Democratic Republic of Congo have returned to destroyed houses after a large volcano erupted, with many searching for missing loved ones.

Mount Nyiragongo turned the sky red and spewed out a river of lava on Saturday, but stopped short of Goma, a city of two million just south of the volcano.

At least 15 deaths have been confirmed, but the number is likely to rise as officials reach the hardest-hit areas.

Nine of the victims died in a traffic accident as people fled.

Four others were killed as they tried to escape a prison while two were burned to death, government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said on Sunday.

More than 170 children are feared to be missing and 150 others had been separated from their families, according to Unicef, which said centres would be set up to help unaccompanied minors.

The lava halted near Buhene district, on the outskirts of Goma, burying hundreds of houses and even large buildings. Reconstruction efforts are likely to take months.

"All the houses in Buhene neighbourhood were burned," Innocent Bahala Shamavu told the Associated Press news agency.

Elsewhere, lava crossed one highway connecting Goma to the city of Beni, severing a key aid and supply route. However, the city's airport was untouched, despite earlier reports that it had been affected.

But seismic tremors had been felt in the aftermath, Mr Muyaya said. "People are advised to remain vigilant, avoid non-essential travel, and follow directions," he tweeted.

The volcano, located 10km (six miles) from Goma, last erupted in 2002, killing 250 people and making 120,000 homeless.

Residents started leaving their houses even before the government announced an evacuation plan. At night, crowds were seen fleeing on foot with mattresses and other belongings.

Rwandan authorities said more than 3,000 people had officially crossed from Goma. Some started to return on Sunday. Others went to higher ground to the west of the city.

One Goma resident, Richard Bahati, said he was in his house when he heard screaming and became extremely worried as he saw the sky reddening outside.

"I lived through the problem with this volcano in 2002. The volcano devastated all our homes and possessions," he said.

A local trader, Kambere Ombeni, was among those who returned to the scene as the rubble still smouldered. "We watched the whole neighbourhood in the Nyiragongo territory go up in smoke. The fire came right down to here. Even now we can still see lava," he said.

Another resident, Irene Bauma, said people would need help from the government to rebuild their lives.

"There's land, people, a population that has lost everything, maybe there are also deaths, who knows? We are asking the government to come and help the survivors of this eruption."

Tom Peyre-Costa, from the Norwegian Refugee Council in Goma, told the BBC what had happened.

"The lava was pretty slow, like, 1km/h, but it didn't stop.... It started burning the houses," he said, adding that humanitarian organisations were already trying to address people's needs.

Mount Nyiragongo is one of the world's more active volcanoes but there were concerns that its activity had not been properly observed by the Goma Volcano Observatory, since the World Bank cut funding amid allegations of corruption.

Professor Mike Burton, a volcanologist at the University of Manchester in England, told the BBC that the lava in Mount Nyiragongo is particularly fluid and has the potential to move fast.

In a report on 10 May, the observatory warned that seismic activity at Nyiragongo had increased.

Last year, the observatory's director, Katcho Karume, told the BBC World Service's Science in Action that the volcano's lava lake had been filling up quickly, increasing the chances of an eruption in the next few years. But he also warned that an earthquake could trigger a disaster earlier.

The volcano's deadliest eruption happened in 1977, when more than 600 people died.

(from BBC Africa news)

(An aerial photo from Reuters of the lava flow on the edge of the city of Goma)

Covid in western Kenya, May 2021 ...

(An old photo of the centre of Kisumu, from DW)

Kenya’s lake region has recorded a spike in COVID-19 infections as the area becomes the new epicenter of the disease in the east African nation, according to the Ministry of Health.

The counties in the region bordering Lake Victoria, namely Kisumu, Kakamega, Siaya, Bungoma, Nyamira, Busia, Migori, Homa Bay and Kisii, are accounting for up to 50 percent of daily infections, overtaking the capital Nairobi and the coastal city of Mombasa, which have been hotspots since the outbreak of the disease in March 2020.   On Saturday, Kisumu had the highest infections countrywide, recording 103 cases ahead of Nairobi, which had 61 out of the total 573 cases from a sample size of 5,798 tested in the last 24 hours, Mutahi Kagwe, the cabinet secretary, Ministry of Health said in a statement.  Similarly, Kisii recorded 28 cases, Busia 24, Kakamega 22, Bungoma 12, and Nyamira 9 as the disease spreads in the region.

The trend in the lake region has been recorded for over a week, with the area contributing 261 out of the 659 cases recorded on Friday out of a sample size of 6,972.   On Thursday, the lake region similarly recorded about 200 cases of the disease out of the 376 reported from a sample of 4,153.  The spike in COVID-19 cases in the region has been blamed on the Indian variant, which was first detected in Kisumu, with at least 20 cases confirmed.

Kenya’s confirmed positive cases stood at 168,108 on Saturday as cumulative tests conducted hit 1.8 million, said Mutahi. The country has vaccinated 952,967 persons as of Saturday.

(News item from Xinhua News Agency  Macao)

Kenya starts its first national wildlife census ... report from Reuters

Kenya began its first national wildlife census on Friday, aiming to aid conservation and identify threats to its vast but threatened wildlife populations.

The census will run until July, with rangers, researchers and community members counting animals on land and from helicopters.

It will focus on counting rare species such as the pangolin, which has been identified as a potential intermediary species for COVID-19, and the Sable antelope, of which fewer than 100 remain in Kenya.

Expanding human settlements, a changing climate that makes resources scarcer, and poaching have contributed to declines in wildlife populations. Giraffe populations in Kenya have fallen about 40% over the last three decades, according to the Africa Wildlife Foundation.

The 250 million shilling ($2.3 million) project was launched by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the tourism ministry at the Shimba Hills National Reserve, the coastal home of Kenya's last population of Sable antelopes.

Some of Kenya's most vulnerable animals, including rhinos and elephants, are counted periodically. But it will be the first time animals are counted systematically in all areas of the country.

"We know there are major gaps. We probably don't know much about what is going on in northern Kenya," said Winnie Kiiru, acting chairperson of the Kenya Wildlife Research Training Institute.

Detailed information about wildlife in northern Kenya's less populated and less visited parks is limited.

The aim is to better understand population sizes and their distribution, to identify threats to animals and suggest conservation strategies.

Tourism accounted for 8.2% of Kenya's GDP in 2019, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, much of it from visits to nature parks, but has fallen drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The plunge in international travel has also had some benefits. Last year was the first since 1999 in which no rhinos were poached, the KWS said.

Northern White Rhino .... is it possible to bring them back ?

 More embryos developed to save white rhinos

Embryos to be used on surrogate female southern white rhinos to create herd of nearly extinct nothern white rhinos.

The Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya on Thursday announced that four new embryos of the nearly extinct northern white rhinos had been developed, promising the endangered animal a new lease on life.

Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, died in 2018 in Kenya leaving behind only two infertile females.

Scientists, who had stored Sudan’s sperm, have been working hard to develop embryos which they plan to use on surrogate female southern white rhinos multiple times to create a herd of pure northern white rhinos which will be reintegrated into the wild.

The Ol Pejeta Conservancy on Thursday said: “The international consortium of scientists and conservationists working towards preventing the extinction of the northern white rhino through advanced assisted reproduction technologies is pleased to announce that in March and April 2021, four additional northern white rhino embryos were produced.”

Next phase to save rhinos

Kenya’s Tourism and Wildlife Minister Najib Balala said in a statement that with nine embryos successfully developed, it was time that scientists moved on to the next phase to use surrogate rhinos to develop a herd of northern white rhinos.

“We are excited with the laboratory outcome of the last ovum pick-up in March. With nine pure northern white rhino embryos now developed, the partners in the project should embark on the next phase of the project – embryo transfer to the surrogate southern white females at Ol Pejeta Conservancy. We are eager to get the progeny from the project that will guarantee survival of the species.”

The conservancy said this is the most successful series of procedures – from oocyte collection in Kenya to in vitro fertilization and cryopreservation in Italy.

The team working to save the nearly extinct rhinos includes Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), Safari Park Dvůr Králové, Kenya Wildlife Service, Ol Pejeta Conservancy and Avantea.

There were hundreds of thousands of northern white rhinos roaming in East and Central Africa, but civil war and years of poaching brought its populations to near extinction.

(from Anadolu Agency)

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Not quite understanding the biology of genetics, I wonder how the progeny can be 'pure' whites .... they collected sperm from Sudan, but where did the eggs come from, if there are no more living female whites ?   I need to investigate further !

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see:-     http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-end-of-sudan.html

Death of Mama Sarah Obama

 

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Sarah Obama, the matriarch of former U.S. President Barack Obama's Kenyan family has died, relatives and officials confirmed Monday. She was at least 99 years old.

Mama Sarah, as the step-grandmother of the former U.S. president was fondly called, promoted education for girls and orphans in her rural Kogelo village. She passed away around 4 a.m. local time while being treated at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral hospital in Kisumu, Kenya's third-largest city in the country's west, according to her daughter Marsat Onyango.

“She died this morning. We are devastated,” Onyango told The Associated Press on a phone call.  "Mama was sick with normal diseases; she did not die of COVID-19,” a family spokesman said, adding that she had tested negative for the disease. He said she had been ill for a week before being taken to the hospital.

President Barack Obama had been informed of the death and has sent his condolences.

She will be buried Tuesday before midday and the funeral will be held under Islamic rites.  “The passing away of Mama Sarah is a big blow to our nation. We’ve lost a strong, virtuous woman, a matriarch who held together the Obama family and was an icon of family values,” President Uhuru Kenyatta said.

She will be remembered for her work to promote education to empower orphans, Kisumu Governor Anyang Nyong’o said while offering his condolences to the people of Kogelo village for losing a matriarch.  “She was a philanthropist who mobilized funds to pay school fees for the orphans,” he said.  Sarah Obama, was the second wife of President Obama’s grandfather and helped raise his father, Barack Obama, Sr. The family is part of Kenya's Luo ethnic group.

President Obama often showed affection toward her and referred to her as “Granny” in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” He described meeting her during his 1988 trip to his father’s homeland and their initial awkwardness as they struggled to communicate, which developed into a warm bond. She attended his first inauguration as president in 2009. Later, Obama spoke about his grandmother again in his September 2014 speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

For decades, Sarah Obama has helped orphans, raising some in her home. The Mama Sara Obama Foundation helped provide food and education to children who lost their parents — providing school supplies, uniforms, basic medical needs, and school fees.  In a 2014 interview with Associated Press, she said that even as an adult, letters would arrive but she couldn’t read them. She said she didn’t want her children to be illiterate, so she saw that all her family’s children went to school.

She recalled pedaling the president’s father six miles (nine kilometers) to school on the back of her bicycle every day from the family’s home village of Kogelo to the bigger town of Ngiya **   to make sure he got the education that she never had.      **( Ng'iya, is where we lived when we first arrived in Kenya, and was the home of Joseph Adhiambo, photo on the right)

“I love education,” Sarah Obama said, "because children learn they can be self-sufficient, especially girls who too often had no opportunity to go to school.  If a woman gets an education she will not only educate her family but educate the entire village,” she said.

In recognition of her work to support education, she was honoured by the United Nations in 2014, receiving the inaugural Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Education Pioneer Award.  

(Report from abc News)

Palm Sunday

Continuing from yesterdays thoughts about palm fronds on the track into Eliye Springs, this photo is from todays Mill Hill newsletter, and shows just what I was thinking about yesterday !  People carrying palm branches, walking down from the Mount of Olives and across the Kidron Valley into Jerusalem.    I have twice walked this very steep path, but never at Easter .... 

Lake 'Rudolf' part 2

El-Molo Island & Nyiru Range beyond, from Porr

Having written a little about the Omo River dam and what its effect will be on the people of the Turkana area, I found myself thinking a lot about our expeditions to that area. 

I found the above photo from one of our trips, and by the late 1970's El Molo island was scarcely populated; the El Molo were a dying tribe, being absorbed into other tribes of the area.   Wikipaedia says "historians have noted that there are few "pure" El Molo left. Most group members are today admixed with adjacent Nilotic populations, primarily Samburu, with only a handful of unmixed El Molo believed to exist. Many El Molo speakers have also adopted cultural customs from these communities. In 1994, there were reportedly only eight unmixed El Molo remaining."   I had noted a few days ago that El Molo was one of the Kenyan languages now thought to be extinct.  

"The El Molo are believed to have originally migrated down into the Turkana Basin around 1000 BC from Ethiopia in the more northerly Horn region. Owing to the arid environment in which they entered, they are held to have then abandoned agricultural activities in favour of lakeside fishing"  (Wikipaedia)

We saw a few El Molo people with scrawny cows and couldn't think what the animals could possibly find to eat among all the lava boulders and gravel that covered the area for miles and miles inland from the lake shore .... until we realised that the cows were driven into the shallow lake to eat the water weeds near the shore ... aquatic cows !

It is Palm Sunday tomorrow, and if we could go to church, (covid lock-down still applies to some churches) we would be given palm crosses, to remember the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem .... when people were waving and strewing palm branches, traditionally used as a celebration of victory.   This came to mind when I was remembering our trip to the west side of Rudolf, to Ferguson's Gulf.   The 'road' up the west side of the lake was then just a rough and sandy track, and the sand had been covered (presumably where the sand was deep and hard to drive over) with palm leaves to give grip to vehicles tyres.  Memories !  

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(Added later:-)

See what I wrote in 2018 .... http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/06/lake-turkana-formerly-lake-rudolf.html

... and  http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/08/ancient-kenyan-burial-site.html

... and  http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/08/more-on-lothagam-burial-site.html

Lake Rudolf .... sorry, Turkana !

 

So much is changing in Africa, and a lot of it not for the better.   What we knew as Lake Rudolf and visited two or three times, was a place for nomadic tribes with their camels and donkeys and goats, living a simple but very hard life.  As I see it, 'development' is rarely for the benefit of the people who live where the development is taking place, and so it would seem in the northern deserts of Kenya/the southern areas of Ethiopia.    There are dams being built across the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, which is the main source of freshwater flowing into Lake Turkana.

"Encompassing swathes of Ethiopia, South Sudan and Kenya, the Omo-Turkana Basin is one of the oldest landscapes in the world that is known to have been inhabited by Homo sapiens and is now one of the world’s most extraordinary examples of ethnic diversity. In the lower Omo Valley alone, a varied history of cross-cultural encounters has played out to produce eight distinct ethnic groups, speaking many languages from Afro-Asiatic to Nilo-Saharan.

In a cattle camp on the bank of the ancient Omo River a Mursi elder implored me to “tell our story so that others might know us before we are all dead in the desert”. Where the river ends in Lake Turkana, this sentiment was echoed by local fishermen: “You will find our bones in the desert.” The story of the Omo-Turkana Basin is now that of the Ethiopian state exploiting its periphery in the name of “development”, trampling on the human rights of its citizens in the process.

Over the past decade, the Ethiopian government has pushed ahead with a huge hydro-electric dam on the Omo, known as Gibe III. Without any meaningful consultation with the communities affected, the state has also appropriated grazing lands and freshwater, threatening their vital resources and local heritage.

All of this has happened despite the area gaining the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. As Richard Leakey, the Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician put it, “these happenings are profoundly disturbing”.

The completion of Gibe III, Africa’s tallest dam to date, has eliminated the annual flood and radically reduced the Omo’s flow, which produces 90% of Lake Turkana’s freshwater input. In doing so, it has reduced sediments and nutrients critical for traditional agriculture, riverside pastures and fish habitat.

Over 30% of the lake inflow will be diverted for commercial irrigation projects. The result could be a fall in lake level comparable to that of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which has shrunk by over two thirds since the 1960s because of irrigation abstractions and which has been called “the world’s worst environmental disaster”. To make way for the commercial plantations planned for the Omo Valley, tens of thousands of hectares of land will be expropriated and thousands of local people displaced.

The need to see “development” as more than a simple matter of an increase in GDP is well established. In his seminal work, Development as Freedom, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, demonstrated that sustainable development must be based on universal access to social and economic necessities as well as political and civil rights. The many communities in the Omo-Turkana Basin have suffered a systematic curtailment of their most basic and essential rights.

International agreements which the Ethiopian government signed up to, such as the 1993 International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights require it to protect and promote the rights of minority cultures and ensure the “right of everyone to take part in cultural life”.

Since 1948, Ethiopia has also been signed up to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II provides against the destruction of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”, famously defined the specific need to protect against the “disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups”.

It is difficult not to conclude that what we are seeing in the Omo is the wholesale disregard of these commitments by the Ethiopian government. Its development policies are not only transforming landscape and heritage but destroying complex systems of sustainable living that have endured for millennia. The huge injustice of all this is that the ecological costs will be borne by local communities while the profits will be enjoyed by central and international corporations.

Meanwhile, centuries of collective wisdom relating to livestock diversification, flood dependant cultivation and customary obligations and mechanisms of livestock exchange, will be made redundant.

This is not to deny, of course, that development, in the sense defined by Sen, is a laudable and necessary enterprise. But we must also recognise that large-scale infrastructure projects are likely to have far reaching consequences for the lifestyles and cultural identities of those they displace.

Projects which set out to increase economic growth without regard for social justice and individual rights are not worthy of the name “development”. Development must benefit locals and for this to happen their voices must not only be heard but also given a central and determining role in any discussions about the future of their lands and livelihoods.

Both cradle and crucible of our species, the Omo-Turkana Basin is unique and precious. Its heritage and history, as well as responsibility for its future, are shared by us all.

(from The Conversation.com)

Is there really no way of moving into the modern world for nomadic peoples without destroying their lives ?   I'm not sure that the invasion of rich tourists is quite the answer, but where lodges and game reserves have been set up by local communities, such as the Samburu, tourists with money to burn have come in droves, and the profits of such ventures benefit the local people, without destroying the ecology and history of an area.   We loved visiting the north of Kenya, and especially the area to the east of Lake Rudolf .... oops !     Turkana !   

It was arid, hot and with no 'facilities' whatsoever, but we took the children there for several days; they splashed around in the shallows of the lake (with an adult in attendance watching for crocodiles !)  They spent the hottest part of the day in shade, catching up with school lessons (I was teaching them myself); they found interesting rocks, and even some fossils !