As masked Nigerian environmental experts examined a communal well in a village where more than 60 children were killed by lead poisoning, barefoot kids streaked with dust sat on the contaminated ground, running their hands through the silt and sucking on their fingers.
Even as a foreign nonprofit begins training villagers to clean up after illegal gold mining caused the poisoning, children still roam among toxic dirt piles. Livestock freely drink from a pond that kills animals.
Much of the dirt here has lead levels more than 23 times US standard limit, but villagers don’t seem to know that the earth can kill them. It’s just one of the issues facing those hoping to get things under control in Dareta and five other villages. A corrupt federal government and an encroaching rainy season also pose problems, as does the allure of quick profits from digging up gold from the surrounding countryside.
Gold wealth can be seen in the shining metal roofs of some of mudwalled homes in Dareta, a village of 2,000 in Zamfara state bordering Niger on the edge of the Sahara Desert. Here, women used hammers to beat open rock ore to find gold.
However, several months earlier, the ore coming to the village carried high concentrations of lead — a substance that can cause brain damage, blindness, deafness and death in young children. Soon children grew quiet, began convulsing and later died. Government officials say more than 160 people, most of them children, have died across the state in recent months from lead poisoning. Hundreds more are sick and face possible long-term disabilities.
It took time for news of the deaths to reach federal authorities from villages deep in the countryside, beyond the reach of paved roads and electricity. Now, the isolation of the villages makes it difficult for aid workers to reach them. Seasonal rains are making the rutted dirt roads virtually impassable.
“We are afraid that if the heavy rains continue ... the village will be inaccessible,” said Muhammad Bello Dareta, the 60-year-old chief of Dareta.
The government announced it would spend US$1.6 million for the cleanup effort, but local farmers who had been offered jobs to scrape away contaminated dirt were idle on Thursday morning, saying the state government balked at paying them.
A state government official arrived on the scene, saying: “The death of even one child is a tragedy.”
He handed out baseball hats supporting the re-election campaign of the state governor.
Five villages known to have also been contaminated have yet to see any cleanup. In Dareta, it will take time to properly scrape away the contaminated dirt across an estimated 26 sites where villagers broke up the lead-ridden ore.
Environmental activist Nnimmo Bassey said it will take a week for a team of experts from his Nigeria-based Environmental Rights Action to assess the extent of the contamination.
“If it was just the soil that the miners took away, that could be contained and carried away,” he said by telephone from Pretoria, South Africa.
He emphasized that if water sources have also been affected “it will take years to clean up.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS