The Gospel in the dumping site

Daniele Moschetti *

Father Daniele Moschetti, Comboni missionary, lives since six years ago in Korogocho, a slum of Nairobi, exactly in front of the Dandora dumping site, the only one of the Kenyan capital. The cleaning up of the dumping site and its relocation have been the focus of an affaire involving the Italian and Kenyan governments, and first and foremost an Italian company, Eurafrica, to whom had been entrusted the project feasibility study which was later on suspended. Fr. Moschetti has gone through all of it, its dark and not yet clarified aspects.

As way of introduction. Since two and half years an Anti-Dandora Interreligious committee has been set up. It is made up of representatives of different Christian denominations that are fighting to get close the dumping site. We ask three things: more care of the one million people's health who live in the proximity of the site; more safety, because the area is infested by criminal gangs; a more serious commitment to guarantee a dignified work to the people who live and work at the dumping site.

We are particularly concerned about this last issue. It will be very important, for example, to involve the people and the companies which will manage the cleaning up and the relocation of this huge rubbish area. It is ages that the closure of Dandora is spoken of. On 13 May 2004

The Italian corporation Jacorossi had signed a M.o.U. with the then Kenyan Minister of Local Government, Karisa Maitha and the former Nairobi Major Joe Kotonya Akech. It was an investment of twenty million Euros. It was supposed to be a joint venture, 80% private and the other 20% owned by the Nairobi Municipality. The project was ready and already the new location had been found: Ruai, at about fifteen kilometres from Nairobi. Operations would have started on August 2004.

Within fifty days from the signing of the memorandum, the agreement would have been signed. However round about June, President Kibaki reshuffled his government and even the Major was changed. The new Major and the new Minister rejected the Jacorossi project because they thought it was the result of bribes, accusations always rejected by the Italian corporation. As a matter of fact everything came to a stop. Yet this new project is more or less the same of the one, submitted some months ago, by Eurafrica to the Kenyan Ministry of Local Government. I happen to see for the first time the document on March 2007. I was at the Ministry of Local Government, together with other people to talk about the debt conversion (swap) issue. An official of the Kenyan Ministry, present at the meeting, told me: Do you know Father that we have sent to the Italian Ministry of Environment a proposal for the relocation of the dumping site??. I was struck. Even the officials of the Italian Cooperation did not know anything. At last- I thought- something is moving on. I asked for a copy of the project. I would have brought it with me when, after a while, I would have gone to Italy for some months and meet the Italian Minister of Environment. The Minister Pegoraro Scanio who was in Nairobi on November 2006, had taken the responsibility to help us about the dumping site removal, making use of the Kyoto Protocols. We had sensitized on this issue even the P.S. of Italian Foreign Affairs, Patrizia Sentinelli, who was in January 2007 in Nairobi for the World Social Forum 07. In this occasion the minister signed a protocol for debt conversion (swap) for 10 years of Italian credits (44 milions of euros) with the Kenya Minister of Finance, Mr. Amos Kimunyia? Once in Italy I met in Milan two representatives of the Ministry of Environment, among others Pier Luigi Petrillo, a lawyer and an official of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. They asked me if I knew Eurafrica to whom the Kenyan government had supposed to give 721 thousands Euro, from the Italian Ministry of Environment, to carry out the Dandora feasibility study and city rubbish collection. I was thunder struck for the princely money about a project that was like the one done by the previous Jacorossi. I answered negatively; they told me it was a quite famous company in Eastern Africa that was set up in 2002. Boh?!? I was surprised. My perplexities became all the more stronger when I checked on the web site of Euroafrica. It deals with almost everything: from arts to water, from rubbish to everything else. I printed out the material and I submitted it to a friend of mine, a lawyer in Trento, who, after a thorough research told me there was something fishy. The administrator was Bruno Calzia, who transferred the activities sometimes later to a certain Tiziana Perroni. We discovered later on that she was his wife. The two had set up and closed down some ten companies. They got the money and soon afterwards they closed down everything in one or two years. Eurafrica had a capital of 10 thousand Euros and just one employee. The legal office is in Naples, a front office in Rome and headquarters in Nairobi. I understood that everything was very very fishy. I talked with Mr. Petrillo and the Italian minister Pecoraro Scanio and I told them I would not have helped them any longer. I did not want to bring another mafia in Korogocho. To me, things ended up there. Before leaving for Nairobi, I got a telephone call from one Doctor Corrado Clini, General Director of the Ministry of Environment. We talk for about fifty minutes. He supported Eurafrica telling me that it had worked well in Bosnia. That this name had been given by the Kenyan government. I told him my perplexities, to me it sounded strange that the Kenyan government had put the society's name in the list given to the Italian government. Usually, first money is asked for, afterwards names are submitted. He got very angry. I answered him back telling him I did not want to bring to Korogocho people making money at the expense of the poor. I shut down the conversation. After a while Pecoraro Scanio called me telling me that he did not trust at all Clini, an old official at the Ministry who knows very well all the tricks.

Once back in Nairobi I went to the Italian Embassy. Nobody knew that society. Not even its managers. Not even a telephone number. I say it again: the argument was over. I was wrong, sadly. At the end of July, Clini rung me up again, telling me that something important would happen around the middle of August, when he would have come to Nairobi to meet his Kenyan colleagues. Neither the Italian Embassy nor the Ministry was aware of this visit. I made the point to communicate it to them. With Clini came other three people, included Petrillo. It was supposed to be a one hour meeting: we got stuck for three hours. He told me that Eurafrica would partner with two other societies: the English Atkins and the Kenyan Howard Humphreys. He added that the World Bank would have even financed the project. I would managed the money, opening a special account and that the aim was the betterment of dumping site people's life conditions. He even suggested I would sit on the evaluation committee. It was a trap, because I would have been prisoner of the structure. I did not have any title to receive the money. How did they dare to think that only the Comboni missionaries would have accepted the money when in the coordination committee there were other churches and religious communities? Moreover the real problem was the society itself: it was so fishy! Clini answered, angrily, that there was no problem at all: after all it was chosen by the Kenyan government and the Italian money would have been given only at the completion of the project, never before hand. Nonetheless my suspicious become all the stronger the following day when there was a meeting at the Ministry of Local Government, between the Italian and Kenyan delegations.

Among the Eurafrica representatives there was Renzo Bernardi, well known in Nairobi as be linked to weapon making factories such as Oto Melara and Beretta and others. I send an sms to the Italian minister Pecoraro Scanio and I told him that in my opinion the real minister was Clini, not him. At time of writing (end of November), the Ministry has suspended the feasibility study entrusted to Eurafrica, giving it to a technical agency of the Ministry itself, to evaluate the project itself. An internal investigation has been launched. It is still too little, to stop lobbies that want to speculate on ecological business!!!

I believe that what I and others are experiencing is a fighting within the Ministry of the Environment itself. I hope that it will not slow down the process of relocating the dumping site. For us it is a death-life issue. To speculate on poor lives is quite mean. In Africa this is the accepted wisdom! We, called to bear witness to the Kingdom of God values and to proclaim the Good News of salvation, are called to be the advocates of the least and oppressed. We cannot sell out our people to somebody who speculates and forgets human dignity.

I feel very bad that to a local Mafia we would add the Italian one. I would have never thought that right here where we are very careful about what is going on around us, it started all this business..

Killing waste

The Dandora Municipal Dump Site, the only dump site in Nairobi is located 8 km away from Nairobi's Central Business District. It is adjacent to Korogocho slums, the fourth largest slum in Nairobi with a population of about 120,000 inhabitants. The dumpsite has been in place for over thirty years, a direct contravention of international environmental laws, which require that dumpsites be closed down after ten to fifteen years of usage. The site also affects Dandora, Kariobangi and Baba Dogo residents with a total population of about 900,000 inhabitants. In fact, the over thirty acres of solid waste is encroaching into the residential houses in Dandora. The pilot study has linked environmental pollution to public health. Soil samples analyzed from locations adjacent to and within the dumpsite show high levels of heavy metals emanating from the site, in particular lead, mercury, cadmium, copper and chromium. At the same time, a medical analysis of the children and adolescents living and schooling near the dumpsite indicates a high incidence of diseases that are associated with high exposure levels to these metal pollutants. For example, about 50% of children examined who live and school near the dumpsite had respiratory ailments and blood lead levels equal to or exceeding internationally accepted toxic levels (10ug/dl of blood) while 30% had size and staining abnormalities of their red blood cells, confirming high exposure to heavy metal poisoning.

Translated by: Enrico Gonzales