Drought-related deaths in the northeast

Several people have died of drought-related causes in Mandera district in Kenya's Northeastern Province, where a prolonged dry spell has led to high levels of malnutrition and livestock deaths, officials said on Thursday. "The situation is getting worse. Several people have died not as a direct result of starvation but of complications related to malnutrition and the use of contaminated water," said Paul Chemutut, the district officer in charge of Mandera. About 70 percent of Mandera's 300,000 population was in need of humanitarian assistance, he added. The arid district is largely inhabited by ethnic Somalis, most of whom are nomadic pastoralists. James Kobia, the government officer in charge of Mandera's El Wak Division, said four people had died in his division. "Children and old people are very weak, and many of them are falling sick because they do not have enough to eat," he said. Kobia said the government was distributing rations of maize, beans and milk powder once a month to about 40 percent of El Wak's 50,000 people, but it was not enough because almost everybody was in need. "We are appealing to humanitarian agencies to come and help us because the situation is getting out of control," he added. Ahmed Mohammed Abdi, a disaster response officer with the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS), said most wells had dried up and people had congregated around the few working boreholes, which kept breaking down because of overuse. The government, he added, had provided seven water tankers but more were needed. Abdi said the KRCS would embark on an exercise to "buy and slaughter" weakened livestock in Mandera on Friday, so that herders could earn some income. The meat would be distributed to the most vulnerable families. He said the worst affected areas were El Wak and Takaba divisions. The Kenyan government has appealed for urgent food aid, saying hundreds of thousands of people in arid and semi-arid areas in the east and northeast will go hungry because of the failure of the short rains. On 16 December, the UN World Food Programme warned that the number of people in need of food in Kenya could rise to 2.5 million in the first half of 2006 because the October-December short rains had failed in many eastern and northern districts.