At least nine people died Tuesday in Kinshasa in floods caused by heavy rains, which submerged up to the main streets of the center of the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
These nine dead are members of the same family, including young children, who were killed when their house collapsed in the Binza Delvaux district of the Ngaliema commune of Kinshasa. An AFP reporter saw their bodies lined up on the ground after being pulled from the rubble.
No official report had yet been released at midday.
The heavy rain that fell overnight paralyzed the Congolese capital in the early morning and caused significant damage in the megalopolis of around 15 million inhabitants, according to testimonies and images posted on social networks.
According to these testimonies, the rain notably caused a landslide in a peripheral district, cutting off national road 1 which leads west.
This road, essential to the supply of the city, connects the capital to the river port of Matadi, between Kinshasa and the Atlantic Ocean. This subsidence of the roadway occurred in the hilly commune of Mont-Ngafula, where frequent landslides are caused by the rains and aggravated by anarchic urbanization.
In town, the small rivers, canals and sewers overflowed, flooding the streets including in Gombe, one of the 24 municipalities of the city-province, which is generally the most spared from the daily galleys of the people of Kinshasa, between lack of electricity , piles of rubbish and recurrent flooding. This district is home to ministries and embassies.
“A disaster”
In November 2019, around forty people died in Kinshasa, victims of torrential rains which had caused floods and landslides. Mont-Ngafula had been one of the most affected communes.
“We have never seen a flood of this magnitude here,” testified to another AFP journalist Blanchard Mvubu, a resident of the CPA Mushie district of this town of Mont-Ngafula.
“I was sleeping, I smelled water in the house… It’s a disaster, we lost all the property in the house, nothing was saved,” he adds.
“People build big houses, it clogs the gutters, the water does not flow freely, that’s what causes the floods,” said Mr. Mvubu, asking the State to intervene, so that “the houses built on the gutters are destroyed”.
Not far from there, in the morning, a young boy asks passers-by for 500 francs to make them cross the street on his back. Same scene closer to the city center, in the town of Lingwala, opposite the Academy of Fine Arts, where the young Djuma transports passers-by on the back of a man.
Walking in the dirty waters that flooded his avenue, Freddy meanwhile assures that he is not in a hurry to empty the large amount of water that has entered the family home. “The waters have risen, everything is under water: shoes, food supplies, clothes. Everything is lost, there is nothing to save,” he said.
Another man, a teacher, holds his shoes in one hand and his documents in a plastic bag in the other, his feet in the water. “I have no choice, I have to give the students an exam,” he says, as traffic picks up little by little, timidly, in the city.