Phyllis Omido, a Kenyan Environmentalist has received a prestigious award in Sweden, the Right Livelihood Award, for her notable work in championing the environmental and land rights of local communities.
Omido got into activism when she, her son and the entire Owino Uhuru village were poisoned by a battery smelting company in Mombasa, back in 2010.
Then a young mother, she secured a public relations job at the company, that allowed her to bring along her 2-year-old son to the workplace.
At the time, the company was already embroiled in legal issues following residents’ complaints about the company’s failure to treat the waste flowing out of the facility.
She did not think much of it until her son fell ill presenting with a high fever, watery eyes, diarrhea and severe anemia.
Visits to doctors did not help much as no physician could find out what was wrong with Omido’s son.
It was not until a former colleague suggested that she have her son tested for lead poisoning that it hit her what might have happened.
“He was the one who told me to get [my son] tested for lead poisoning,” Omido explained in a past interview. “I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘You know where you work?”
The young woman sent a sample of her son’s blood to South Africa since there was no laboratory testing for lead in Kenya at the time.
The results she received were shocking.
Her son’s blood had a reading of 45 micrograms per deciliter (ug/dl). That was higher than the worst case of lead poisoning recorded in the United States at the time.
It was at this point that she related the several cases of illness among children in the village to lead poisoning. Testing on three of the children confirmed her fears.
According to a report by Mayo Clinic, “Exposure to even low levels of lead can cause damage over time, especially in children. The greatest risk is to brain development, where irreversible damage can occur."
"Higher levels can damage the kidneys and nervous system in both children and adults. Very high lead levels may cause seizures, unconsciousness and death.”
Investigations uncovered a very sick community. Grazing cows were dropping dead, chickens drinking water trickling from the smelter were dying, children and adults were falling deathly ill, and women gave birth prematurely, to stillbirths or to children with deformities.
The village’s soil was poisoned to unprecedented levels, the water contaminated and the air unbreathable.
The realisation pushed the activist to organize protests.
Once the community linked their health problems and several fatalities to the smelting company, they joined Omido’s protests, which were then picked up by local and international media resulting in a probe into the company and its final closure in 2014.
Her efforts earned her the Goldman Environmental Prize for global environmentalists in 2015.
Since then Omido has led to the closure of 16 other similar companies exploiting and endangering their workers.
She currently leads a network of 120 grassroots Land and Environmental Defenders across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania and is spearheading a campaign against the establishment of a nuclear power plant in Kilifi.
Omido has been compared to Erin Brockovich, an American environmental activist who exposed water pollution in California in the 1990s that led to deaths and serious illnesses such as cancer. This new award just adds to her numerous accolades.
This comes at a time when the government has taken action to curb such poisoning occurrences in the future.
On September 22, President William Ruto signed an agreement to join the Minamata Convention on Mercury. This basically means that Kenya, just like other countries under the convention, had agreed to eliminate the use and release of mercury from artisanal and small-scale gold mining.
The convention was formed in the wake of mass mercury poisoning in Minamata City, Japan that claimed several lives and left scores disabled.
