By Standard Reporter
Nairobi, Kenya; Kenya is a country of contrasts. During the peak of the rainy season you can bet your last shilling there will be flooding and landslides. However, at some point before the end of the year, there will be food shortages and even famine in parts of the country.
The directive by President Uhuru to relevant Government departments to come up with permanent solutions to the perennial problem of flooding and the havoc it wreaks is welcome.
But if indeed Sh1.6 billion has been allocated to mitigate the negative effects of flooding, it is equally important that the teams now presumably seeking answers to the problem as directed by the President consider the following.
Billions of litres of rain water have fallen from the skies in the past month, but very little of it has been harvested. If this water could be stored for later use the benefits would be widespread. The reasons for flooding and landslides are pretty obvious to the schooled. They include heavy rainfall, impermeable rock, deforestation and farming and construction of houses on floodplains and steep slopes among other things.
How do you prevent flooding? Well, it is not just one but a combination of solutions all tailored for different scenarios. You build dams and levees in areas like Budalangi and Nyando, straighten channels ahead of the rains to increase the speed of river flow, dredge rivers to make them deeper, restrict farming and construction on flood plains.
But dams flood large areas to create reservoirs displacing hundreds of people. Straightening channels causes soil erosion downstream and alters wildlife habitats while levees can be breached.
Depending on which solution is chosen, they are all expensive and so it is equally important that communities likely to be affected by flooding and landslides heed early warnings by the Government to vacate identified hot spots early enough.
However, in cities like Nairobi, much of the destruction has been wrought on roads due to shoddy construction and maintenance and blocked or non-existent drainage. In this respect, the ball falls squarely in the court of the Kenya Urban Roads Authority.
