The rainy season, aggravated by the El Niño climatic phenomenon, is having deadly consequences in East Africa: Tanzania announced Thursday that 155 people had died.
In Tanzania, heavy rains in recent weeks have caused floods and landslides in various parts of the country, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa told Parliament.
“More than 51,000 homes and 200,000 people were affected, with 155 deaths, around 236 people were injured and more than 10,000 homes were damaged to varying degrees,” he listed, without specifying the period over which the deaths occurred. were identified.
Mr. Majaliwa also said that many crops and infrastructure such as roads, bridges and railways were damaged due to bad weather.
The devastating effects of precipitation are “mainly due to environmental degradation”, he added, pointing in particular to deforestation.
On Thursday, neighboring Kenya continued to count the dead and search for the missing, the day after flooding in several districts of the capital Nairobi and in neighboring counties, cutting roads and railway lines.
The death toll rose to 13, after the discovery of three bodies on Thursday in the Mathare slum, one of the hardest hit areas, Fred Abuga, police commander of Starehe sub-county, told AFP. , in the center of the city.
Before these floods, at least 32 people had already died and more than 40,000 had been displaced in the country since the start of the rainy season in March, according to the UN humanitarian agency (Ocha). The total toll therefore amounts to at least 45 deaths.
“We need to put everyone on alert,” Kenyan President William Ruto said during a meeting to coordinate a “multi-agency” response to these floods, emphasizing the need to relocate residents from threatened areas.
Vice President Rigathi Gachagua also warned the population about “forecasts for next week (which) indicate that the country will experience above-normal rainfall.”
– Until May –
Several other countries in the region are affected by unusually heavy precipitation, caused by a new episode of El Niño which began in mid-2023 and could last until May, the World Meteorological Organization warned on March 5 ( WMO).
In addition to increasing temperatures, El Niño causes droughts in some parts of the world, such as southern Africa, and heavy rains in others.
In Burundi, the poorest country on the planet, the authorities reported last week that 96,000 people had been internally displaced due to almost incessant rains for several months.
In Somalia, at least four people have been killed since April 19 after flash floods, according to OCHA.
In Uganda, a landlocked country, bad weather left two dead and displaced several hundred people.
El Niño has already wreaked havoc in Eastern Africa in the past.
In December, at least 89 people were killed in landslides and floods caused by heavy rains in northern Tanzania.
Throughout the region, more than 300 people died. In Somalia, more than a million people were displaced by floods.
From October 1997 to January 1998, gigantic floods fueled by torrential rains caused by El Niño caused more than 6,000 deaths in five countries in the region.
