CHIKWAWA, Malawi, Jan 9 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Maxwell Nsona stood in the dried-out bed of the Nthumba River in Malawi’s southern Chikwawa district and recalled how this wide ribbon of footprint-studded sand turned into a raging torrent during heavy rains a decade ago.

The fear is that this could happen again as a country brought to its knees by southern Africa’s worst drought in decades braces for a rainy season that meteorologists say could bring widespread flooding and landslides.

People, animals and the very land across huge swathes of southern Africa have been depleted and desiccated with millions of people going hungry and economies faltering.

The drought has been fuelled by El Niño, a climate phenomenon that can exacerbate drought or storms – weather conditions that are made more likely by climate change.

Rain is desperately needed in Malawi, but with deliverance from drought comes danger and that is because the impending La Niña weather phenomenon, which involves the cooling of ocean surface temperatures, could bring increased rainfall, but it also threatens flooding, soil erosion and landslides.

It is not as though Nsona and his fellow farmers from Pende village have been idle either.

They have done what they can to prepare for what they know is coming in a country that regularly experiences the deadly, and ever more frequent, pendulum swing from life-threatening droughts to devastating floods.

For example, they built dykes along the river and reinforced the banks with rocks and by planting trees and other vegetation.

“We made a resolution to find a solution after floods had displaced a chief and killed three people almost 10 years ago,” said the 50-year-old father-of-three, who has lived in the region his whole life and grows maize, millet and cotton.

“We tried to redirect it back to its course using hoes and shovels … We also built a 150-metre dyke using an excavator, but it was washed away when cyclones Ana and … Freddy hit this area,” he said, explaining that two relief agencies helped them with the construction.

Cyclone Ana hit Malawi in 2022, and Freddy, one of the deadliest storms to hit the continent in two decades, ripped through Malawi just over a year later.

Another storm season has already begun, with devastating consequences.

On Dec. 14, peoples’ cell phones beeped with a warning from the Department Of Disaster Management Affairs: Cyclone Chido was on its way and could bring torrential rains and flooding.

The message, sent in local languages, told people to head for the hills, if they could.

Just two days later, after laying waste to the French overseas territory of Mayotte off Africa’s east coast, Chido barrelled into Malawi, killing at least 13 people, destroying homes and leaving many communities without food, water and healthcare.

ROTTING MANGOES

Malawi declared a state of disaster in March 2024 as the drought decimated crops, leaving around 5.7 million people – 20% of the population – facing acute food insecurity.

At the end of the year, rains started in some parts of Malawi, a country where more than 80% of people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, but these downpours have also caused problems among people who have been left with few resources as crops wilted in the fields.

In November, heavy winds and rain struck Namwera, an area in Malawi’s old capital Zomba, damaging homes and blowing the drought-resistant mangoes that people rely on for food off the trees.

In the nearby district of Machinga, which was not affected by the storm, Hanna Wethiwa, 52, was busy picking fresh mangoes from trees outside her home in Lumera village.

She cut them up and boiled them over an outside fire before adding a powdered juice, which costs around 700 Malawi kwacha ($0.4077), as two of her six children waited eagerly nearby for their meal.

Apart from mangoes, Wethiwa has been relying on wild yams and grass seeds to survive, even though there are reports of people dying from food poisoning after eating wild tubers.

“This year has been the hardest because all of our crops dried due to the drought. We started eating sorghum-like grass seeds, which we fetched from the bush,” the mother-of-seven told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We dry them, pound and cook porridge, but they did not last long because every household was relying on them.”

CALLS FOR INTERNATIONAL HELP

At November’s COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, Malawi’s Vice President Michael Usi, who was also representing the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group, told delegates climate change “is not a distant abstraction”.

He said floods, droughts, and unpredictable weather patterns were disrupting lives in Malawi and threatening the well-being of future generations.

“For a country like Malawi, the consequences are not only economic, but also deeply inhumane. The catastrophe compromises food security, public health and infrastructure development, exacerbates poverty and undermines our hard-won development gains,” he said.

Although Malawi’s greenhouse gas emissions are among the lowest in the world, Usi said the country was committed to reducing them further. He also said Loss and Damage funding must be made available to vulnerable countries.

Countries at the COP29 summit adopted a $300-billion-a-year global finance target to help poorer nations cope with impacts of climate change, but those countries said it was woefully insufficient.

In the meantime, officials in Malawi must do the best they can. Like Daniel Mandala, the district disaster risk management officer for Nsanje in southern Malawi, where areas around the Shire River are prone to flooding.

He is busy preparing for coming months by reviewing the district disaster contingency plan, which includes all emergency activities ranging from preparedness, response and recovery.

“Prevention is better than cure hence the (Nsanje district) council is also warning communities to relocate to safe places before the rains reach their climax,” he said, adding that people were being urged to take weather warnings seriously.

Mandala said flooding and storms had become more frequent and intense in Nsanje over the last decade.

“It is not necessarily difficult to manage annual disasters as we already know the areas to be affected and the estimated number of households to be affected,” he said.

“The only challenge is the magnitude of the flooding, which has increased, and the reluctance of some communities to move to upland when early warnings are issued in good time.”

($1 = 1,717.0200 kwacha)

(Reporting by Charle Pensulo; Editing by Clar Ni Chonghaile and Jon Hemming)