Lessons from Ethiopian rubbish dump landslide

Taiwo Ojoye, Punch

30 March 2017

Ethiopia, and indeed the developing world, would not forget Saturday, 11 March 2017 in a hurry. It was the day a natural disaster happened at an unnatural site: a towering mound of rubbish in the fast-growing capital city of Addis Ababa. Being the city’s only landfill site, hundreds of people live near the dump in makeshift shacks. The landslide caught many of the squatters unawares, and left them buried in an avalanche of dirt. At the last count, 113 were dead, and scores of others still missing.

The Reppi dump has existed for close to 50 years, so it is virtually a landmark spot in the country which had in the past suffered from debilitating drought and poverty, and is today a fast-growing investment hub in Africa. The Ethiopian government declared three days of national mourning for the victims of the landfill disaster.

As emergency workers searched through the “tornadoed dump”, one could not help imagine how it sustained the many lives that depended on it for daily survival — scavenging, sorting, sieving through whatever resources is sighted; and then scampering to welcome fresh payloads of dirt.

Now, there is a touching, but instructive aspect to the tragic incident – which had actually inspired this article. A particular Ethiopian man, Fadila Bargicho, “testified” how one of his sons was saved from being consumed by the landslide by what he termed as divine intervention. An impatient Ayider Habesha, nine, had left his older brother searching for his footwear. He headed to religious lessons in a hut next to the gigantic refuse dump.

Ayider was buried alive with his six classmates and teacher when the open landfill gave way. His brother, Abdurahim, 16, who could not find his shoe did not make it to the religious lesson class; and, so, missed the disaster by whiskers. Before that fateful day, he always attended the instructions with Ayider.

“He could not find his shoe and that was God’s way of saving one of my children,” said Bargicho.

The first lesson from the Ethiopian tragedy is that our religious organisations and leaders should wake up to their responsibilities to the environment. One would be tempted to just ignore the above “testimony from a traumatised father” and write it off as another of Africa’s religious paradoxes.

But the truth is that no matter how you look at it, this is a tale as pregnant as the calcified mound of the 50-year-old rubbish that set it off. Does it not read like a plot from an atheistic Black Comedy, that the boy who missed his religious lesson was the one that escaped the dark talons of death? The lad who was so eager to drink in spiritual enlightenment died, along with his teacher and other enthusiastic youths.

The way I choose to look at is that God is calling our attention to the fact that one of our religious duties to the world of today is environmentalism. The people who coined the axiom “cleanliness is next to godliness” were not playing with words.

It is a fact that the Ethiopian government actually told the landfill squatters to relocate from the site. They left for a newly designated landfill in a new location; but because of some issues came back to the Reppi landfill.

If the religious organisations in the country were living up to expectation as eco-responsible citizens, they would have been at the vanguard of a campaign for squatters to leave the dumpsite for good. As Africans, we are aware of the influence religious leaders wield over a large section of the citizenry. A single sermon by an eco-conscious preacher would have been enough to dissuade squatters from coming back to the dirt yard.

Surely, a spiritual push by the faithful for divine intervention in the environmental problems of Addis Ababa could bring down a miracle. Pray, if God could bulldoze our enemies and economic obstacles out of our way (when we pray in faith), won’t the same God clear out our eco-clogs and looming environmental disasters!

The second lesson is that there are certain developmental issues that should not be enmeshed in politics. According to emerging revelations, if the Ethiopian government had implemented an AFD-sponsored project several years ago, the landfill disaster would not have happened.

The Guardian of London reported that in 2011, the French development agency gave Addis Ababa government 34.6 million Euros to close and rehabilitate Reppi landfill and build a new landfill site at Sendafa, about 25 miles outside the capital, in Oromia State. The AFD funding also covers retraining for the hundreds of people who picked through the waste at Reppi for valuable items, some of whom died in the landslide.

Oromia has been engulfed by violence since November 2015. The unrest has been fuelled by concerns over a master plan to integrate the development of Addis Ababa — a metropolis of about five million people — with surrounding Oromo areas. When Reppi was established in the 1960s, it was in the countryside. Now it is surrounded by shops and houses, which have encroached on an expanding rubbish mountain.

Rubbish started being sent to Sendafa, rather than Reppi, in January last year. But operations were suspended seven months later after protests by local farmers, who said the Sendafa site was poisoning water and killing livestock. The trucks then returned to Reppi, where rubbish had been dumped without being treated, compacted or otherwise managed for half a century.

The third lesson is that we should never take environmental sanitation for granted. The water sanitation and hygiene sector is always left to take care of itself. Plans are not usually made ahead; rather the government and the people are always on reactionary mode. We wait for waterways to be fully clogged before we clean. We wait for the gutters to totally become silted before we pick up the shovels. We continue to defecate in the public until the day cholera calls, and then we stop for a while.

Ethiopia should teach us that as our population is rising, so is the waste we generate. The irony is that as we need more space to build our houses and expand our cities; we also have emerging needs for space to take care of our rubbish. The question is how do we prioritise; how do we manage the new order, especially the environmental imponderables?

In a number of places, especially in the rural areas, some persons dig up a hole or pit, sometimes less than 10-feet deep. They dispose all solid waste in the pit until it gets to the point where there is need to cover it up. They just abandon the dirt pit. Behold, that is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. In most Nigerian cities, the method of waste disposal widely accepted and practised is dumpsites, which is actually just a fallow piece of land on any part of town. If one is unfortunate, it could just be at the back of one’s bedroom window. In fact, some people wake up one morning and find that their front yard had become a dumpsite overnight!

We might not die in a rubbish landslide like the Ethiopians; but by unwholesome waste disposal, we are actually dying in installments. The diseases that are spread via indiscriminate disposal of say, hospital and maternity waste, and the dioxins that enter our bloodstream through improper burning of chemical waste end up giving our society as many casualties as Ethiopia lost when its own badly managed waste collapsed.

Original article

Ethiopia: Government failures to blame for dozens of deaths at rubbish dump

Amnesty International, 13 March 2017

The death of more than 60 people in a landslide at a vast rubbish dump on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital over the weekend is a clear case of dereliction of duty by the Ethiopian authorities, said Amnesty International today.

Dozens are still missing since the landslide at the 36-hectare Repi municipal dumpsite in Addis Ababa on 11 March, and many families have been left homeless after their makeshift houses were buried under tonnes of waste.

The Ethiopian government is fully responsible for this totally preventable disaster. It was aware that the landfill was full to capacity but continued to use it regardless. It also let hundreds of people continue to live in close proximity to it, said Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.

These people, including many women and children, had no option but to live and work in such a hazardous environment because of the government’s failure to protect their right to adequate housing, and decent work.

Now in its fifth decade, Repi - also known as Koshe, which means dust - is the oldest landfill in Addis Ababa, a city of more than 3.6 million people. More than 150 people were at the site when the landslide happened. Many of them had been scavenging items for sale while others lived there permanently, in unsafe makeshift housing.

The government must do everything in its power to account for all those who are missing, provide survivors with adequate alternative housing, and safe and healthy working conditions, said Muthoni Wanyeki.

It must also ensure that a full-fledged inquiry is held to determine the specific causes of the landslide, and hold the individual officials responsible to account.

Original release

132 households without documents and 62 with a legal document. 194x5=970

Back