Environmental horror in Lilongwe

• Oil spill pollutes water sources

The area is less than 10 kilometres from the seat of government, Capital Hill and the Lilongwe City Council (LCC).

In fact, the bureaucrats pass it on their way to the airport to fly out to God knows where and, while in the air, they look down at it—apparently without a thought.

But right under the nose of these authorities, an environmental disaster is unfolding at the hands of industrialists.

The industrial waste is destroying what passes for this community’s only livelihood—small-scale vegetable growing—and, it appears, their government is just watching. The poor community appears to have nowhere to turn to.

The Nation can reveal that more than 150 villagers on the outskirts of Lilongwe City along the M1 Road say they are in grave danger of suffering—and even dying—from various diseases, as they are forced to drink what an environmental expert claims is heavily contaminated water.

They also live in an atmosphere of filth under one of the most shocking environmental disasters in Malawi.

So bad is the disaster that if government and private institutions involved in the policing and management of the environment and public health do not intervene urgently, the oil and chicken-waste seepage and pollution signature could snowball right into the fresh Lake Malawi waters, according to an environmental expert.

And so furious and threatened are the people living near the Nafutsa Stream, in and around a dambo area to the west of the Malawi Institute of Management (MIM) and near Kamuzu International Airport that they have resolved to “die fighting”.

They have agreed to sue two companies the village communities literally saw setting up shop a few years ago before the firms later started unleashing the myriad woes on them through their poor waste management systems.

The companies are Sunseed Oil Limited, on one hand and Central Poultry (CP) Feeds, on the other.

These happen to be sister companies, sharing the same perimeter fence, whose factories are at the heart of the blossoming environmental disaster.

The area’s Village Head Gongweya’s adviser, 44-year-old Hackson Chinyama, could not contain his anger in an interview with The Nation a week ago.

“Enough is enough. Through formal delegations, between February and March this year, we tried to tell the company owners to improve the management of their factory waste. But the promises and assurances they gave us, for improvements, never materialised.

“Now push has come to shove, for we know of at least one goat that died from drinking the polluted water. What does that say of us, human beings, who also drink the same water every day? We want to be compensated for being dragged into this death trap,” charged Chinyama.

The communities requested the assistance of a legal firm, which has reportedly taken up the matter.

The legal firm tasked the compilation of a fact-finding report to the Lilongwe-based private firm—Water and Environmental Management Services (Wems)—which came up with what may pass as a seven-page “smoking gun” report.

The report is replete with photographs of how ‘rivers’ of oil waste and sludgy chicken-waste endanger and permeate into the lives of people in villages like Gongweya, Chakhutamadzi, Kanjira and Manyenje in the area.

The villages are in a dambo (valley) area of the Nafutsa Stream, which originates from Dzenza area as its catchment.

Heavily polluted by oil, Nafutsa Stream meets Nankhaka Stream, which flows into Lingadzi River that feeds into Lilongwe River, Linthipe River and, eventually, Lake Malawi.

Wems engineer Samson Mwandira, who wrote the report on the unfolding environmental disaster, says if government and private environmental and health authorities act promptly, they may nip the problem in the bud.

“The oil factory’s waste mismanagement has been pronounced in the area over the past few months. But, certainly, if environmental experts turn a blind eye to this disaster, the coming rain water threatens to spread the pollution down all those streams and rivers mentioned in the report. That can eventually spell doom and gloom for flora and fauna in our prized national fresh water resource, Lake Malawi,” he lamented.

Mwandira’s report claims that downstream, from the Nafutsa Stream, economic livelihood in the poor village communities is slowly dying.

Maize, bananas, sugar cane, potatoes, tomatoes and other vegetables, which could be grown successfully in the area in the past, now wilt and cannot produce or mature well because of the water pollution, according to Mwandira and the villagers we interviewed.

When in contact with fire, the oil spill sludge burns for hours on end, until the fire consumes all the oil seepage pools, they added.

Such fire, the villagers testify, is characterised by sizzling, hard-to-quell multi-coloured flames.

The report claims: “Any animal, goat, dog, birds, frogs and others that have been in contact with this effluent oil have died. At the time of the visit [September 3 2014], a goat that had just been brought to the village took a drink of the water and it died. Since then, the goats [in the village] are locked up in their kholas, for fear they would all perish.”

When The Nation followed up on the report and visited the area on October 25, it turned out that there were more miseries for the person who lost the goat.

He claims that his pig later had stepped onto what seemed firm ground, but happened to be a death trap sludge of the oil waste and water—where the pig sank “like a rock,” quick-sand style.

“I am still smarting from the shock of losing K43 000 (US$87) through the deaths of my livestock; I had just bought the pig for K25 000 (US$51) and the goat for K18 000 (US$36). We have never experienced such shocking events before,” lament 40-year-old Gerson Bokosi, from Gongweya Village.

Commenting on behalf of women in Magwero Village, 35-year-old Loveness Mpanje, a mother of four, said life has been horrible since December last year, when flood water inundated the village area with both the oil sludge and chicken waste.

“The chicken waste brought a putrid smell and maggots all over, while the oil waste immediately disturbed and foiled our gardening and, eventually, polluted our wells and other water sources,” she claimed.

When contacted for comment, the company officials said they would speed up corrective measures to stop the waste spillage immediately.

They asked for some “breathing space” before the implementation of more permanent measures—including constructing a bigger septic tank and digging trenches that would contain the waste within the company’s perimeter fence.

The officials did not answer our questionnaire that tried to probe the issues and secure written commitments concerning any corrective measures, in the face of accusations by the concerned villagers that the officials had not delivered on earlier promises made to them over their queries.

“Your questionnaire has been an eye-opener to us—that there are serious issues between our group of companies and some village communities near our factories. I will be travelling to the area immediately, to have first-hand knowledge of the problems, which we want to solve once and for all,” group head of human resources and corporate affairs Collins Jambo said.

“I know the people querying have been distressed,” admitted Jambo, who said although the two parties had had several discussions in the recent past, much headway could not be made.

He added: “You see, as a group of companies, we may say our performance may be 95 percent impressive. Why should you publicise the five percent of mistakes and overlook the larger good?” he asked.

Part of the larger good he was referring to is that the company is helping the nation in economic development through its vegetable oil and animal feed products. Also, the queried factories employ over 3 000 workers, while the entire group of companies has a workforce of more than 4 000.

“I want to put it on record that Central Poultry Feed [2000] Limited advocates good waste management and we are in the forefront advocating proper standards in waste management. This is why we set aside a substantial budget towards improving things,” said Jambo, announcing that he sits on the powerful Malawi Technical Committee for the Environment.

He explained that the oil and chicken waste spillage into the nearby villages, which had lasted nearly a year, was proof that increasing production had outstripped waste management systems put in place initially.

“The queries are a clear signal we are getting that the sewer we have is now too small and we need to extend it. Going forward, our machines to do this job have been ordered and are, in fact, at Nacala [Port in Mozambique] on the way here and these queries will be fully resolved soon,” he added.

More shocking is the fact that environmental authorities said they were not aware of the problem while LCC said it learnt about the issue in September this year.

Ministry of Natural Resources, Energy and Mining—which deals with environmental issues—said last week that The Nation’s enquiries about the beleaguered communities had been their first contact with the problem.

The ministry’s director of environmental affairs Dr. Alucius Kamperewera said last week he would immediately dispatch a team to investigate the matter, which he said he had not been aware of.

When contacted, LCC said it had picked up the issue in September this year during a routine inspection of factories and business premises in the capital city.

“The case was tabled at our Health and Environment Committee recently and after discussing it, we referred it to the full Council Meeting, which should come up with a resolution on what action to take about the problem. That meeting will take place any time now, during this final quarter of the year,” LCC’s director of environment, parks and recreation Allan Kwanjana said.