The very food we are eating is slowly poisoning us to death

While perusing through this publication yesterday an article really stood out for me. Kigali is known as an ‘un-African’ city for a myriad of reasons. It is safe, the roads are not potholed, the street lights actually work and the well-constructed pavement makes walking, and jogging for those so inclined, a stroll in the park (pun intended). However, the thing that visitors, who’ve been to other African cities, remark over and over again is just how clean it is. The ubiquitous piles of rotting garbage and Marabou Storks that feed on the festering mess that you will find in many cities are totally absent. This is something that we Kigali dwellers have taken for granted.Sadly, unless something is done, this will change.According to a report that was released by the environment management body, REMA, titled ‘Industrial pollution and food safety in Kigali’, “only about 25 per cent of solid waste generated in Kigali is estimated to arrive at the landfill. Some solid waste is still dumped in public areas. The new landfill in Nduba in Gasabo District is far away from the city’s densest suburbs and is only reachable by dirt road and the steep slopes make it challenging for both large garbage trucks and common residents to reach it”.This is extremely worrisome. If only twenty-five per cent of the rubbish that is generated in Kigali goes to the landfill sites, I must ask, where does the other seventy-five per cent go? Is there a black hole in someone’s backyard that simply swallows up all the rubbish? Or is there something more sinister happening? Are people burning their rubbish? Burying it perhaps? Or are they simply dumping it somewhere under the cover of darkness? I have a niggling feeling that people are resorting to the latter method of garbage disposal. Especially because, as the report states, “garbage collectors have also had to increase their client fees to compensate for extra mileage and inconveniences”. I implore the city authorities to investigate this issue because I fear that I, and other unfortunate city dwellers, will wake up one day and find a pile of rubbish right outside my doorstep. The rest of the report makes for even more grim reading. You know that gulley next to your house? The one that fills with runoff every time it rains? Well, not only do you have to worry about you or a member of your family falling in it and injuring themselves, according to this report, the rainwater that washes through them might be inadvertently poisoning you. All that water that flows down our Kigali hills ends up in one place really, the Nyabarongo wetland. And guess what we find in this wetland? Crops. Guess who is eating those succulent tomatoes and cabbages that the wetland so generously provides? Anyone who buys their groceries in the markets around town. Guess what scientists have found when they tested these crops? Well, they established that the trace metal concentrations in crops cultivated in Nyabugogo wetland were within European standards for crop production. Which is good. However, on testing a sample of the population that consumed those crops, the metal amounts they had ingested exceeded the maximum threshold recommended by the World Health Organisation. “Lead intake was seven orders of magnitude higher than the threshold and four orders of magnitude higher form consumption of tubers,” the report reads. According to scientists, exposure to heavy metals can cause retardation in children, numerous cancers and kidney complications.I don’t know about you, but this is very frightening and, in my humble opinion, there are only two ways to arrest this issue. As a stop-gap measure, farming around the wetland area must cease. While I know just how unfair it seems to the poor farmers trying to make a living, we cannot sit on hands while we slowly poison our children and, indeed, ourselves. Public health policy demands that. Secondly, as it’s been said before, there needs to be a proper, city-wide sewerage system. There are no two ways about it. Lives are at stake here. The writer is a New Times editor currently pursuing a post-graduate degree. @sannykigali

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The very food we are eating is slowly poisoning us to death