Cholera meets polio in Jomo city

In Blantyre, a man who lived skint on dirty streets has become a mayor the city was probably waiting for. Elected last November, Isaac Jomo Osman is widely photographed shovelling debris from drains and cleaning the streets with Blantyre City Council ground workers. “I grew up on these streets, so I have witnessed worsening sanitation breakdown for decades,” he says, boots on the ground.

“Keeping the city clean isn’t just the job of Jomo or the council, but everyone has to play a part.” “Stop dumping of waste without minding where it lands,” he says. “Together, we must clean up,” he says. The clean-up is mostly confined to Limbe and surrounding towns, with little trickling to settlements where people spend more hours.

The boots-on-the-ground approach has catapulted Jomo to the helm of Malawi Local Government Association (Malga). Last December, councillors and heads of councils elected the one-time street-connected child Malga president. He teasingly terms himself the president of all councillors and mayors nationwide.

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On Saturday, Jomo only came a notch shy of becoming the regional mayor, having been elected vice-president of United Cities and Local Governments of Southern Africa. However, a public health storm at home threatens his growing influence amplified by the waste management crusade. Blantyre is the epicentre of Malawi’s cholera and polio outbreaks fuelled by poor sanitation, especially contaminated human excreta.

The commercial hub has recorded two deaths and nearly half of the country’s 102 confirmed cases in the raging wave confirmed on December 11. The city suffered the worst sting of Malawi’s deadliest outbreak which killed about 1 770 of nearly 55 000 confirmed patients from 2002 to 2003. The new wave coincides with the discovery of type-2 poliovirus in a seven-year-old child from Makhetha clustered settlement. Health authorities also discovered the vaccine-preventable virus in samples of stools collected from Soche and Manase sewage systems.

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