Of aflatoxin scare and a crafty scheme to make a quick buck from condemned food

impending crisis.

Last term before breaking for the May holidays, we had an incident that threw the school fraternity into panic after a form two student was taken ill after consuming a meal of ugali.

Following the incident in another part of the country where students perished and several were hospitalized after eating food suspected of being poisoned, the school administration felt obliged to carry out thorough investigation into the matter.

Luckily the student was treated at Mavumbi referral hospital and discharged but the panic continued to spread within the student community.

There were rumours that students were planning to boycott meals with some complaining that the grains from which githeri was being made were infested with weevils.

Weevils or no weevils, as the teacher on duty and the discipline master, I felt obliged to ensure that the matter is immediately addressed to forestall an

We held an impromptu meeting which was also attended by our principal Obote .

Among the resolutions that were reached was carrying a thorough testing of all the foodstuff in the store especially maize and rice which are more prone to aflatoxin infection.

This was to be conducted during the holidays before schools reopened.

Our deputy headmaster(sorry, principal) Mr Napoleon Bonaparte would lead the exercise assisted by yours truly.

However, I led the teachers in shooting down a suggestion by the principal that the teachers on duty should be obliged to test all the food before students take it.

I told the meeting that while it’s imperative for students safety to be assured it was morally wrong to use teachers as guinea pigs.

“Bwana principal, suggesting that teachers taste the food before students consume it is like insinuating that we are immune to food poisoning and therefore working like shields for student safety. Truth is, if food is contaminated it will affect everyone of us ” Every teacher concurred with me including Marashi my literature colleague who was nodding like a monitor lizard.

To be sincere I am a chemistry teacher but detecting aflatoxin in grains is a different thing altogether.

However, I sold the idea to Napoleon that the two of us can make a quick buck by declaring the whole food consignment unfit for human consumption.

After that we shall stage manage a destruction exercise , then later sell the foodstuff and pocket the loot. So throughout the holiday period, Napoleon and yours truly have been working around the clock to ensure the exercise of destroying the contaminated food is a success.

The food will be destroyed at the school compound at night during the first week of opening, but only Napoleon, yours truly and three prefects will witness the exercise , to minimise exposure to harmful smoke from the burning food.

Behind the scenes I have already hatched plans for the supply of sawdust and some waste papers. Sonambao, a timber merchant in Mavumbi town will discreetly supply the sawdust and other waste to the school, at a fee of course.

After burning the “contaminated foodstuff” Napoleon and I shall spirit out the real foodstuff and store it safely till we get a willing buyer.

That’s how our plans to make a quick buck stand at the moment, and damn the consequences.

To a casual observer, Voi town in Taita- Taveta County is among the fastest growing urban centres in Coast region and a business hub gearing towards a twenty four hour economy.

In fact for visitors, the rapid growth of the town is an indicator of the huge economic potential that Voi holds , being located next to the busy Nairobi -Mombasa highway, the Nairobi Kisumu Railway line and the expansive Tsavo National Park.

Voi missed becoming one of the tourism resort cities in Coast region in line with vision 2030 , the main problem being lack of enough land for expansion and lack of a watertight master plan that could guide this rapid expansion.

However, beyond this seemingly rapid expansion and development lies a challenge that might soon become a nightmare to town planners given that initial blueprints that had been designed to guide the planning of the town have largely been ignored and corruption, political patronage and mediocrity have seen the emergence of runaway infrastructure, buildings and numerous informal settlements whose structures do not conform to any architectural standards.

It’s not uncommon to find triangular plots in the town, not by design but by default, while some structures are built on plots whose shapes are not defined in geometry.

In another case that illustrates the haphazard plans being used to allocate plots in Voi township, one of the private developers was allocated a plot with a power transmission pole complete with a transformer inside it.

According to an former MD of the Taita-Taveta Water and Sewerage Company (Tavevo) the poor planning of the town has been a big challenge to the water company when it came to the issue of laying pipelines and connecting water to new buildings.

“Some of the town planners who came to Voi in recent years totally ignored the way leaves that had been demarcated for water pipelines and future expansions and allocated plots which ended up over lapping the way leaves. Some of the Part Development plans(PDPs) designed by the then Voi municipal council planners also added to the confusion as they disregarded the sections set aside for water pipes” he says.

He cited an example of the problems they encountered while laying the Sh 137 million Msinga 2 Pipeline funded by the World Bank which was meant to double the water supply to Voi town and its environs.

“The Msinga 1 pipeline was put up in the 1960s and a way leave of 9 meters on both sides of the pipeline clearly demarcated for future expansion.

However, when the Msinga 2 pipeline was being put up in 2013 we encountered a lot of problems because people had constructed houses right on top of the new pipeline way leave,” he said. However, he pointed out that eventually the World Bank compensated those who were affected before they moved out to pave way for the ambitious water project which will be commissioned later this year.

He pointed out that even at the moment, the company was getting problems connecting new building to the water mains because of lack of a through way for the pipes.

“Sometimes we are forced to incur extra expenses putting up water pipes along longer routes to new buildings because the shorter and more economical routes have already been blocked by other buildings,” said the former Tavevo official.

In fact the Voi bus Park is one major indicator of how haphazard planning of Voi has lead to congestion and confusion.