Kenya’s National Assembly Committee on Environment, Forestry & Mining has opened an inquiry that sounds more like a Cold-War thriller than a routine parliamentary sitting: Were shipping containers packed with radioactive junk quietly buried beneath the sands of Wajir, Garissa and Marsabit in the 1990s – and is that why cancer cases there are exploding today?
Wajir South MP Mohammed Adow tabled a memorandum claiming eyewitnesses saw “sealed metal containers” lowered into freshly dug pits and covered up before dawn. Locals, he said, still avoid the sites out of fear – and rising hospital wards suggest they might have a point.
The numbers that rattled MPs.
Garissa Governor Nathif Jama testified that doctors have logged 2,437 cancer cases since 2023 – 440 in 2023, 1,347 in 2024 and 650 in just the first half of 2025, with oesophageal cancer topping the charts.
Most patients come from sparsely populated rural hamlets. “We’re drinking the problem,” Jama told the committee, blaming contaminated groundwater shared by people and livestock.
Lawmakers plan to summon anyone who might know where the bodies, well, barrels, are buried.
On the list: former minister-turned-whistle-blower Cyrus Jirongo, county officials who compiled a mid-1980s dump-site map, and unnamed “foreign contractors” said to have paid cash for silence when regulations were lax. Committee chair Vincent Musyoka promised “no diplomatic niceties” if evidence points beyond Kenya’s borders.
The probe lands just weeks after opposition leaders threatened to sue over a planned KSh 500 billion nuclear power plant in Kilifi. Critics now ask why Kenya is racing toward atomic energy while still unsure whether it’s sitting on someone else’s radioactive leftovers.
MPs will tour alleged dump sites, commission soil-and-water tests, and draft a timeline for clean-up or compensation. They’ve also hinted at criminal referrals if a paper trail confirms illegal imports of hazardous waste.
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