By David Njagi

Freelance Journalist - Kenya

Nairobi, Kenya, August 8, 2009 – Habiba Alin lies crouched on a neatly spread bed rest on the floor adorned with colorful Somali outfits. Inside a dome shaped thatched hut at Bulajogo village in Wajir district of North Eastern province of Kenya, she rests her head on a second hand pillow tucked over the makeshift she has called bed for the last seven months. It appears to give her cozy relief from the pain she is struggling to fend off.

Months of agony have left the 48-year-old brow furrowed with lines of suffering and a ghastly stare, like the one leveled by someone who has seen freedom beckoning, yet that freedom is as elusive as it chastening - at least for now.

Nearby, her relatives wait hopefully, although desperation is already beginning to show on their frail, sometimes stooped stance, as they watch the speechless figure lying on the floor ebb out of her mortal soul.

"She has now been lying down like this for about seven months," Amina Alin, Habiba's elder sister, told IslamOnline.net (IOL). "She was taken to the hospital where she underwent several tests including TB and HIV but at last she was diagnosed with throat cancer."

"She had first complained about chest pain and later on she was unable to eat," added 50-year-old Amina. "She could not swallow any solid food and later on she was totally unable to eat."

Throat Cancer on the Rise

A few homesteads from where Habiba lies dying, Adan Abdi has just buried his step father who travelled from a pastoral village called Arbejahan six months ago to seek treatment in Wajir hospital. Like Habiba, the disease took away his ability to speak or eat before robbing him of his life.

"At first he said he thought it was just tonsils because he was having difficulties swallowing saliva and the throat was a bit stiff," says Hassan Yakub's stepson. "Later he could not take solid food and survived on water and liquefied food. However, he would throw it all up, until the last two months when he could not swallow anything. Finally he died of starvation."

Aden Garad, a community social worker based in Wajir, says throat cancer has continued to claim his kinsmen for the last 20 years, and he can count more than 150 people who have died from the disease.

Last month alone, he says, four have died while another four were hospitalized at the Wajir District Hospital, information that Dr. Salat Girad Mohamed, a superintendent at the hospital, confirmed.

Despite the suffering that throat cancer is bringing to this arid region of Kenya, however, little is known about its causes, while Mohamed says there is no known treatment for the disease so far.

Toxic or Nuclear?

According to Garad, few hypothesis have been fronted about the cause of throat cancer in this part of the country. In his view, the problem can be traced to the post colonial era when toxic waste of unverified substances was reportedly dumped in North Eastern Kenya by European settlers.

But Truth Be Told Network (TBT), a Kenyan based lobby group working for social and economic welfare of the Somali people, says the causes of throat cancer stretches beyond Kenyan soil, and could be linked to alleged dumping of nuclear waste along the coastlines of the two countries.

According to the lobby group, the pattern of infection in North Eastern Kenya appears to have been shared by neighboring Somali residents, 20 years after Mogadishu reported the first allegations of nuclear waste dumping in her coastal waters.

While Sheikh Salah Abdi of TBT says there is no evidence to prove that nuclear waste was dumped there, he maintains his organization has clues which show that fish found in the two countries have contaminated substances linked to the alleged waste dumping.

"It has been documented that there is widespread dumping of waste in Somalia waters and on inland sites for over 20 years," asserted Abdi. "But whether the waste was nuclear contaminated or not no one has verified."

According to Abdi, a spate of unregulated cross border trade seized the horn of Africa, opening up routes for the ferrying of huge fish stockpiles for both local and international consumption, following the collapse of the Somalia government in 1991.

Now the organization fears the effects of toxic dumping in Somali waters and its effects on both local and international consumers could be wider than earlier thought, following allegations of overfishing by private companies from as far as Europe.

Speaking in anonymity to IslamOnline.net in Nairobi, a civil society worker based in Hargeysa, Somaliland, said there have been sporadic outbreaks of skin rashes in the town, with more than 300 cases showing signs of radiation contamination, and some mothers give birth to malformed babies.

It is estimated that more than US$ 300 million worth of tuna, shrimp and lobster are ferried overseas from the 3,300 kilometers long Somali coast line every year, although the European Union requires food exports to obey the traceability and rules of origin as a South-North trade condition.

For now, it is not clear whether the diseases plaguing the two countries has been caused by allegations of DDT dumping alleged by Sheikh Ahmed Ali, a former civic leader in Wajir township, nor is it clear whether there is a nuclear waste link as lobbyists and civil societies claim. But what is clear is that some waste dumping of some kind was cast in unknown parts of Kenya and Somalia, and it could be the reason people living near these sites are ailing.

Ecological Disaster

Kenya's National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA), however, maintains that the allegations are based on assumptions and denies knowledge of any kind of toxic dumping on Kenyan soil.

"In 2006 we sent a high powered delegation to North Eastern Province to investigate these allegations," Dr. Muasya Mwinzi, NEMA's director general, told IOL. "They found no evidence of toxic or nuclear dumping."

According to Sheikh Abdi the consequences of toxic dumping are not confined to food consumption alone, but are heralding a serious ecological disaster across the 637,657 sq kilometer coast of neighboring Somaliland.

He says most of the substances found in the dumpsites are not biodegradable and have been piling up over the years because there is no legislative instrument that restricts dumping by foreign private companies.

Quoted in The Independent online issue of January 5, 2009, Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, says the dumpsites could contain nuclear substances because heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury have been found there before.

Speaking on telephone to IOL in Nairobi, Somali Ambassador in Kenya, H.E. Mohamed Ali Nur, says after the 2005 tsunami, cases of radiation sickness were reported after leaking barrels believed to have been dumped into the Indian Ocean were washed ashore.

People living in the parts of the two countries where cases of exposure have been suspected believe the collapse in 1991 of the Somali government led by the late President Siad Barre, made parts of Eastern and Horn of Africa porous to illegal activities ranging from piracy, smuggling and illegal industrial waste disposal.

According to Nur, the American led evacuation of Somali children last year revealed that most were suffering from tumors, while some had missing limbs.

"Most of the children were from towns along the Somali coastline," says Nur. "Most had tumors while others had limbs missing from their hands and legs. This is reason enough to believe that some illegal toxic dumping has happened in Somalia."

David Njagi is a Nairobi-based freelance journalist whose work has been published in Africa and the United Kingdom. He is fluent in both English and Kiswahili languages. He can be reached at danjagi@gmail.com or +254 720 480 830.

Source: Islam Online, August 4, 2009

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