Water, water everywhere, I suspect in our heads too!

People use a bicycle to ferry goods across flooded Morogoro Road in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on May 7, 2015. PHOTO | DANIEL HAYDUK | AFP 

In Summary

• We know it is going to rain in April, kind of rain. It happens every year and quite predictably too, kind of rain.

By ELSIE EYAKUZE
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Every year the city of Dar es Salaam floods. We are not unique in this, I hereby acknowledge the very many wet places that suffer from monsoon and other seasonal deluges. However. I am beginning to
think our floods are man made.

One of the markers of great civilisations through time has been their management of water. Of course, the environment in its entirety is important et cetera but water is life.

Did you know, for example, that Mexico City is built on the bones of a far more grand civilisation and ancient city which had a moat and canals?

Or think of the aqueducts of ancient Rome, or the Jordanian city of Petra that sustained, in antiquity, a population in the desert through judicious management of water.

Let alone the many ways that Asia had come up with to channel rivers and superb amounts of rainfall through rice fields and fish ponds and canals.

Heck, the Dutch even figured out how to make the sea retreat. So you must understand if I am a bit salty about my city flooding yet again.

Our predecessors all over the world who had no access to the virtually miraculous technologies we possess today — I mean, seriously — were still better than my municipality at coping.

This isn’t biblical flooding either. Just run of the mill, we know it is going to rain in April, kind of rain. It happens every year and quite predictably too, kind of rain.

Farmers depend on it showing up, kind of rain. We have a meteorology office that can track the weather, kind of rain.

Over the 20 years I have lived in what is now becoming one of Africa’s megalopolises, environmental workers along with civil engineers and reasonable citizens have asked for good drainage systems. 

Just a little basic civil engineering and city management. We are not subject to cyclones or tsunamis. We had natural swampland and waterways to guide the land waters to the sea. It wasn’t complicated. Which is what makes it infuriating. 

The consequences of our neglect are always predictable. Those who built houses in riverbeds get their lives wrecked. We all get to wade in a sea of dirty city water like filthy medieval Europeans circa the Black plague, difference being that we now have some access to antibiotics.

Is it enough access? Nope. Because the roads are flooded so you cannot get to a health center and then wait until the hoards of mosquitoes add malaria to this equation. Did I even mention cholera? 

We all have our political biases and views of what governments should do. Mine is pretty simple. We employ government to take. Care. Of. The. Basics. Redistribute wealth via taxation at least in the form of good infrastructure and basic welfare. 

For the entirely simple reason that: This way we won’t all be folded over with a runny stomach while trying to get the babies to a hospital to get them on a drip and treatment. This is 2018.

I can’t believe we are still having this conversation with the people in the nice leather half boots bought by state monies while we all stand in line, holding crying children, telling each other how terrible the commute was.

Come on! 

Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: elsieeyakuze@gmail.com