Wide area affected

In Marsabit, 673 km from where Nagila was and over 500 km from Kenya's capital Nairobi, fellow journalist Aby Agina was also witnessing firsthand the fatal effects of the drought. Camels on the verge of death and hundreds of carcasses of sheep, goats and cattle were strewn around dry watering holes. Agina said the residents told him that the drought had so far claimed 20,000 goats, 5,000 cows and 50 camels.

Agina told ChinAfrica that residents in the area receive five 20-liter jerrycans of water every fortnight, which they use for cooking, drinking and for watering their animals.

In the scorching heat, it is difficult to picture how a household of six people can survive on 100 liters of water for a fortnight.

The local area members of parliament had asked the government and other aid agencies to help save the lives of their constituents. Unfortunately five people had already died as a result of the biting hunger.

Since December 2010, the country's food situation has been ambling toward critical as a result of the total failure of the short-rains that are normally experienced in the last quarter of the year. With the failed rains and Kenya's dependence on rain-fed agriculture, food scarcity and hunger became inevitable.

Nearly 20 of the country's 47 counties are affected by the ravaging famine and the government puts the official figures of those affected at 5 million. Most of the affected counties are in the arid and semi-arid areas, where rainfall over the past two years has been erratic, while in some areas, there has been no rain for the last 12 months.

Memories

The last time the country experienced a worse scenario was in 2009, when 10 million people were threatened with starvation. At the height of the drought in October that year, up to 5.8 million people were relying on relief food.

This time, the Kenya Red Cross continues to sound the alarm bells saying the situation will only "get worse" as the dry conditions continue across the country. 

Abbas Gullet, Secretary General of the Kenya Red Cross, said in a TV interview on February 7, while rolling out the national emergency appeal for this year's famine, the country has been sliding into a critical situation, with 1.8 million people in critical need of relief food supplies.

"We are a blessed country. We get rain twice a year, yet it seems we can't sustain food production. We keep on importing from countries, some of which are deserts," said Gullet.

In May last year, the meteorological department put out a warning that the short rains will fail. The weathermen predicted La Ninaphenomenon. The weatherman warned that the weather pattern building up was similar to what was witnessed in the country in 1973 – when the country was hit by one of its worst famines ever.

When the warning came, Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga, through his deputy Musalia Mudavadi, told Parliament and the country, "Fire fighting cannot be [Kenya's] policy for responding to crisis."

The prime minister assured the republic that the country will survive and that the government had put in place adequate measures to ensure that no Kenyan died as a result of the hunger.