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Guinea’s President Mamadi Doumbouya on Saturday visited the district of the capital hit by a deadly landfill disaster as homeless families asked for help getting rehoused and raised doubts about a planned mass burial.
At least 34 people were killed when a huge mound of rubbish collapsed onto homes in the Dar es Salam neighbourhood following heavy rains in the early hours of last Sunday. Another 33 people were injured, six of them seriously.
Since then, the authorities have been demolishing other houses in the zone considered at risk from the rubbish dump, an operation announced days before the disaster.
Doumbouya, wearing sunglasses and protected by dozens of soldiers who kept most journalists at a distance, visited the site nearly a week after the disaster, an AFP journalist witnessed.
The president made the visit to “empathise with the pain of the whole population” and to ensure that instructions regarding work there had been carried out, presidential spokesman General Amara Camara told reporters.
The authorities planned to clear the whole site of rubbish and transform it into an “urban park”, he added, with the government saying some 1,500 families are to be rehoused.
But local inhabitants said they had only been given 24 hours’ notice that their homes would be destroyed, with some saying they were unaware until bulldozers showed up at dawn.
“All my family is sleeping out in the open under the heavy rains,” one local resident told AFP.
Some locals also objected to the government’s plan to organise a mass burial of the victims.
“The dead are not anonymous,” said Mamadou Mouctar Bah, a resident and spokesman for a committee representing those hit by the disaster and the subsequent demolitions.
In a statement to local television, the group called for greater consultation on the planned mass burial. It also called for state aid to get rehoused.
The group said it was “awaiting the fulfilment of commitments made to the victims” a few days after the tragedy, and “compensation for owners whose homes were destroyed or demolished” during the eviction operation.
The government had said it was evicting residents and securing the area surrounding the landfill due to the risk of further landslides.
