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DAKAR (AlertNet) - Seynabou Diakate looked at the dark clouds above and quickened her pace to catch a bus for Pikine, the suburb of a million inhabitants east of Senegal's capital Dakar. "I must run, else if the rain meets me here I will not be able to ent
DAKAR (AlertNet) - Seynabou Diakate looked at the dark clouds above and quickened her pace to catch a bus for Pikine, the suburb of a million inhabitants east of Senegal's capital Dakar.
"I must run, else if the rain meets me here I will not be able to enter my home," the 37-year-old mother said with anxiety written on her face. "This morning I had to wade in knee-deep water to head for work after the night's heavy rains... I'm scared of rainfall now."
After last year's seasonal floods in West Africa which drove more than half a million people from their homes and killed over 100 others, there are many like Seynabou who want to curse the skies for the rains and the devastation they can bring.
Since June this year, floods and mudslides caused by heavy rains have already killed at least 77 people, destroyed the homes, businesses and farms of over 152,000 others and crushed bridges, roads, schools and other public infrastructure in at least eight countries in the region, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Rains are indispensable for farming in West Africa and don't have to come with a side-effect of deadly floods and mudslides. But increasingly they do - and the reasons for this are diverse.
Climate change is one culprit, says Angelita Mendy, an OCHA spokeswoman in Dakar.
"Weather and climatic variations are such that places that used to be arid and had little or no rain are having abundant downpours as seen in Burkina Faso last year and Chad this year, whereas the people, infrastructure are not adapted to this."
Authorities have to improve drainage facilities and address overcrowding in many cities, which forces the poorest to settle in unsafe areas that are at risk of floods or mudslides from heavy rains, experts say.
"In principle, the solution is to move people out of these risky sites and resettle them in more convenient locations with proper urbanisation plans," said Moustapha Diallo, a spokesman for the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC).
But political analysts say governments in the region are unlikely to resort to such solutions as they fear that mass re-settlement will lead to social strife and eventually snowball into uprisings against their overall policies and the wide-spread poverty.
"Nothing has been done since last year's floods, people are still living on rooftops and the government only started to talk about evacuating people from risky areas in June," Deye Fatou Toure, a Senegalese parliamentarian, said during a recent parliamentary session.
The flooding of Dakar's suburbs in 2009 forced more than 200,000 people to temporarily leave their homes.
While waiting for action from their governments, West Africans are caught between hoping for the rains to irrigate their crops and praying that they don't destroy their homes.
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