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Kenyans will continue dying of cholera in the coming decades because the country is yet to meet set targets for safe waste disposal and clean water provision.
Speaking in July 2007 after signing the first National Environmental Sanitation and Hygiene Policy, the then Health Minister Charity Ngilu promised that by the end of this year, 90 per cent of Kenyans would have clean water and their waste safely disposed of.
"By 2015 all premises, dwellings and their immediate surroundings will be clean and free from waste and unpleasant odours, and will have adequate drainage. The burden of environmental sanitation and hygiene related diseases will be drastically reduced," she said.
To achieve this, she estimated that the country needed to construct an average of 234,000 toilets per year for the next ten years.
Today, it is estimated that eight million Kenyans in pastoral, rural and urban areas defaecate in the open, while almost half of the population, 41 per cent, do not have access to clean drinking water.
According to Health Principal Secretary Khadijah Kassachoon, defecation in bushes costs the country about Sh7.8 billion annually yet eliminating the practice would require less than Sh1.2 million to put up hygienic latrines.
Recently, Prof Jay P Graham of The George Washington University, US, ranked Kenya among nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa with the highest number of people who still defecate in the open.
The most affected lot, according to environmentalist Chritine Wangari of Multi Touch International, are the poor who walk to urban areas in search of casual work and street families who can't afford to pay for the now commercialised toilet facilities.
Ngilu's promise of clean water and safe sanitation was supposed to coincide with the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Because of Kenya's and other poor countries failure to meet MDG targets on water and sanitation, the UN has made a new proposal called Sustainable Development Goals where the time-frame has been extended to 2030.
Poor waste disposal or lack of such systems in the slums is compounded by huge populations living entirely on street foods. A study by Dr Oyunga-Ogubi documented by the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation found a fifth of residents of Kangemi and Korogocho in Nairobi live on street foods.
A much more recent study on street foods in Nairobi by Morris Githaiga of University of Nairobi, warned the country was sitting on a cholera time-bomb.
"Poor hygiene, inadequate access to potable water supply and garbage disposal, and unsanitary conditions such as proximity to sewers and garbage dumps make street foods a cholera time-bomb," said Dr Githaiga.
"Vegetables, fruits and meats were found to carry disease causing germs way above quality standards for ready to eat food," said Githaiga who investigated 56 food samples from 29 stalls in Nairobi.
Water engineer Wangai Ndirangu of Water Capacity Network says it is inconceivable that Kenyans are dying of cholera today.
"This is just a case of institutional negligence where national and country governments are not monitoring waste disposal systems and water quality at the point of use," he said.
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