Observations of a Slum Tourist Part 3

It is fair to say that since I first moved to Kibera almost two years ago very little has changed. There is a big road being built on the far side, known to most as ‘the bypass’. It is going to greatly ease the traffic around central Nairobi as lorries travelling from Mombasa to Kisumu will be able to use this route instead of going via the central business district. However, it will also bypass Kibera, because it does not look like any slip roads will allow traffic in to or out of the slum. The effect therefore will be to hem in Kibera, flanked on one side by the railway line and now walled concrete road on the other. Meanwhile, the Nairobi River continues to weave its way in between the two constrainers eventually spewing out all of Kibera’s unwanted things that could not get out any other way. 

The fact that this new road seems to ignore Kibera and its close to one million inhabitants is an ominous sign. In other parts of the world, such as Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, New Mexico, the favellas and slums are generally considered as economic hot-beds which with imaginative development will evolve into residential estates or suburbs. As a result they are fed with all the necessary ingredients needed for growth – roads, health and education facilities, business centres and security. For Kibera however, the recommended answer is to suffocate it and slowly close it down, giving the government back the land that it rightly owns. This is being done by the ‘slum up-grading project’, which is designed to enable slum dwellers to move up the valley into affordable sky rise buildings, so that the semi permanent buildings they leave in their wake can be demolished. When these people were moved in 2009, not one slum house was demolished, because when the bulldozers moved in they found unhappy inhabitants in the labelled houses claiming they had lived there all their lives. This was either because the people who had got the very affordable sky-rise accommodation were either friends of someone important in the project, or had given the keys to their slum houses to a relative who resembled them and could argue they had always been there. The bulldozers didn’t hang around; being faced with an angry mob of Kiberans was not their idea of an early morning welcome, especially knowing that not a single law enforcer would come to their support when summonsed. 

And this represents the biggest problem behind Kibera. It is not that the people don’t want to be there and wish they could move elsewhere. In fact, on the contrary, Kiberan land is one of the most sought after real estates in Nairobi. The housing is cheap (as dictated by the people themselves, not the landlords), and unlike other slums in Nairobi which are too far out, the inhabitants can walk into town in the mornings and evenings. On top of that there are over 2000 NGO’s who will do almost anything for you if you act like you need it. As a result it is almost impossible to find a house to rent in Kibera, so it is not surprising that as the slum upgrading was completed, there were people queuing to fill the gaps made by those departing. 

Economic studies have estimated that Kibera has over $1 million dollars coming in and out of its hold every day. This is often gawped at as a sign that people underestimate the economic capacity of Kibera – personally I think it is a deplorable figure given the fact that over 800,000 people live there. Nevertheless, it is possible for this figure to pass in and out of Kibera’s threshold because there are jobs in Nairobi, and if you want a job in Kenya, your best bet by far is to go to the big capital. Nairobi now has or three million inhabitants; ten times the size of Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city. In fact, Kisumu, which has only 290,000 people, is only around half the size of Dadaab refugee camp on the border with Somalia. This is the same Kisumu which used to be the economic capital of Lake Victoria during the time of the East African Community. Today it is a city with an international airport, yet no real industry to speak of. If you come from Nyanza or Western Provinces, you would not try your luck living in Kisumu if you were looking for a job, because you would have a much better chance of finding one in Nairobi. Indeed Kisumu does not have much real estate that could be described as a ‘slum’ at all. Successive governments have neglected the west of Kenya, and Kisumu and the satellite towns around it are ghosts of their potential. Even the fish industry, which would so naturally be based in the west because of the fishing in Lake Victoria, barely benefits the region, and the main government fish processing plant is in Thika, 25 miles north of Nairobi. Thika is an area that has often been favoured since independence because of tribal persuasions, and the fish factory there had created hundreds of jobs for people in the area, and done little to help the people who live around the lake where the fish were caught.

To make up for it, those from Nyanza and Western Province come to Nairobi in droves, and if they can get a place to stay in Kibera they will not pass up the opportunity. How will this ever change unless investment is poured in the direction of Kisumu, and the surrounding population can see that they don’t need to leave their province as migrant workers, disturbing their family life, and further expanding the slums around the city? By upgrading Kibera, we are therefore treating a symptom and not a cause. As rural life in western Kenya becomes more congested and less lucrative, people will continue to come to Nairobi, and if they do not stay in Kibera they will create another slum on the fringe of the city, where infrastructure will be worse, and the commute to town far further. There is so much land around the airport and Thika road which would be easy victim to this kind of shanty expansionism.  

Meanwhile, small NGO’s do their best to play their part in the slum up-grade. Millions are invested ever year into micro projects which make the lives of the slum dwellers a bit easier, from cleaning up the water, to building mini-schools, to picking up litter, to starting saving schemes with the women. But in the long run, none of these problems of health, sanitation, education, or livelihoods are getting any better, because the demand for what Kibera is and stands for is much higher than the powers conspiring to bring it down – as I said in my first line, very little has noticeably changed since I have been here.  The 2000 NGO’s here need to do more to collectively address the government, whose responsibility it is to reduce the incentives to move to Nairobi in the first place. This would definitely include investing in the provinces, and investing in industries, such as coffee processing, silk garment production, coconut oil manufacturing and flower assembling that do not need an urban centre to flourish. 

Let us imagine that this happens – when the tide turns and demand for Kibera decreases, it is important that the government and NGO’s develop the small 2.5 sqaure kilometres in a way that turns it into the Nairobi suburb it deserves to be. This does not include stifling it and bulldozing it, which, even if it were desirable would be practically impossible. Originally this land was designated to host a complex transport network, with roads and railways leading to Limuru and beyond. Originally it was owned by the government, but one major hurdle in resolving the problem of Kibera is if the government concedes that it no longer owns the land. Indeed for the last twenty years, title deeds held by Kiberan residents have been recognised by the courts in Kenya, and while it may not be possible enforce because of fearful policemen, it is possible to get a court order of eviction for a Kiberan tenant who abuses their tenancy agreement – my own landlord has done it several times.

Once the government has accepted that it no longer owns the land, it needs to work out how it can reacquire it so that it has control over it again. In my opinion this should be done through the systems that are currently operational in Kibera. If you are a landlord and you want your property to be demolished, it is possible to get them out, but you have to use the Kiberan way. Of course, it is fair by social law and custom that a tenant not paying rent should not continue occupying a house (squatters rights issue aside). It should also be fair that if a notice of three or six months is given then the tenant should be expected to move out at the end of the time period. In Kibera, unlike much of the rest of the world, you need to rely on the community to help you achieve this aim, however much compensation you offer – bulldozers won’t do it and nor will policemen. The youth and gangs will, so will the elected ‘village’ chief, and so will the neighbours if they really believe in the plans you have for their slum. This last part is the most important – let the residents of Kibera dictate the changes. They do not want the whole area to be demolished. They would fear the unknown and would consider it too much too fast. But would they like a paved road running through the middle of the slum? Would they like a market place opened out with buildings designed for business and small industry? Would they like a closed gutters and sewage systems instead of open drains and streams? More probably, and for this to happen demolition of some houses is vital. It is not possible to effectively achieve any of the above if we keep pussy-footing around the existing structures and status quo as most of the NGO’s are doing. And unfortunately NGO’s cannot be the people to lead this – I don’t believe that they will correctly judge the power balances in the slum to successfully evict the people who need to be moved, and then keep the buildings empty until they have been destroyed and replaced with the new engineering or structures. Even the government will have to be extremely sensitive, subtle and humbly accept that they will often fail. It will also take time, which is why I suggest we start now. 

At the same time, let us congratulate Uhuru Kenyatta on his promise to build a fish processing plant in Homa Bay on Lake Victoria, and hope that for once a Kenyan government will distribute investment and resources indiscriminately across the whole country.

In response to Julian Brazer’s study: ‘An Over-Crowded Land’.

I was dismayed to read the report by Julian Brazer MP on Immigration in UK. http://conservativehome.blogs.com/files/anovercrowdedland.pdf

It is an interesting read, and persuasive in parts, but what alarms me most is that I get a feeling the current government is using the immigration issue as a scape-goat for their failings in economic policy, and the state of Britain as a whole. To me, this is the worst kind of cowardice because it encourages the British public, who are worried and frustrated about the countries stability, to have a target group to aim their insecurities at; a target group who have no vote and no way of responding.

My attention was flagged to the paper by the suggestion at the end that we should temporarily deport asylum seekers to Kenya while they are having their cases examined, and I will come back to this. However, before I do I want to pick apart a few of Brazer’s preceding arguments.

Up until the labour government, immigration was balanced in that the same number of people were emigrating as immigrating, and in some years, more were emigrating. Recently, the excess in immigration has been around 200,000 per year, recently dipping to 180,000. With this continuing the population is set to boom, but what Brazer does not even mention is that British fertility rate has been decreasing almost steadily since the 1960’s. Without immigration, the accepted fertility rate to sustain a population is 2.33, but in Britain it is only 1.94. It is impossible to say at what speed the British population would shrink without immigration, but it seems irresponsible of Brazer to not even mention dropping fertility rates when his article is called ‘An Over Crowded Land’.

Also, it is misleading to talk about Britain as ‘one of the most densely populated countries in the world’. This may well be true, but ‘national’ population density is rarely a parameter used to depict a country’s woes or blessings: only in cases such as Monaco, Macao, Singapore, and UAE states can we see entire states with only urban land mass; for other countries, population density is only a concern in urbanised areas. In Britain, no urban area has significant population densities, and indeed, only 6.9% of British land-mass is classed as ‘urban’. Therefore using national population density in the arguments surrounding immigration, illegal immigrants and asylum seekers is unfair and sensationalist. 

Now to the Kenya issue. Brazer writes:

“ Crucially we need to take a long, hard look at the asylum issue.

No decent country sends people back to their countries of origin

to face persecution. We have made some progress in speeding

up applications, but they remain slow and, if we tighten controls

in other areas, applications may soar again. All too often people

disappear in the process. We must consider making treaties with

democratic Third World countries with plenty of space (few are

as crowded as the UK) and establishing two or three processing

centres abroad. For example, if we could secure a deal with

Kenya, it would be worth our while to make a considerable

payment per capita to them to provide a haven for Somali

asylum seekers, sent from Britain to have their cases examined

(by a British tribunal, as now). Those who absconded would not

then be able to disappear in this country.”

If this is based on the assumption that the asylum seekers would be detained in Kenya, then I would have a problem with this on the level of human rights, but you would have to question why they wouldn’t just detain asylum seekers in UK while their case is being examined. Surely that would be cheaper than carting them off to Kenya and back? If they are not being detained in Kenya (as I suspect Brazer intends), then Brazer is overlooking some concerning aspects of life in Kenya, especially for a Somali refugee.

As you will see in my blog below, Somali refugees in Kenya do not have an easy time, and around Christmas time, many Somali refugees living in Nairobi were forced to either return to their country (from which they had fled for their lives) or go to Dadaab refugee camp where opportunities and dignity are severally threatened. This was because of a government who suddenly turned hostile to the Somali community (ostensibly to the whole refugee community, but really only Somalis bore the brunt of it), and a population, who, in a case worse than UK, feel threatened by outsiders such as Somalis. In Kenya, the government have done a much better job than Brazer and his colleagues in turning the local communities against immigrants and fostering a situation where xenophobia is permitted. Unfortunately for them, Kenya has some neighbours who have harboured revolving battlegrounds within their borders: Somalia, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, DR Congo to name a selection, and refugees have seen Kenya as a haven nonetheless. Now there are nearly 1 million refugees in Kenya. Here we really do have some of the highest population densities in the world (Kibera 800,000/2.5 sqkm) and the highest unemployment rates. But as a nation Kenya could not compete with UK in terms of population density, because it is a vast country. But 10% of the population lives in Nairobi, and 90% of the population lives in the thin strip of fertility between Lake Victoria and the coast, combining the rift valley and the central highlands. Most of the land mass in Kenya is uninhabitable, and Dadaab refugee camp in the middle of this hostile land proves this, as the inhabitants survive on food aid from NGO’s. So if the asylum seekers did abscond, where would they go other than to the areas of Kenya that suffer from far greater challenges from lack of population control than Britain? They would be victimised by the local population, and by the government that Brazer calls ‘democratic’.

Too much talk on the issue of immigration during tough times is dangerous – the extremes can be seen in countries like Zimbabwe and Zaire under Mobutu, and Uganda under Idi Amin, where leaders turned on minority groups when their economies were threatened, and blamed them for the countries downfall. In Zaire this contributed to a continental war, and in Zimbabwe and Uganda the mass exodus that followed by the foreigners led to economic implosions with inflation rising over 1000% per year. This may seem far more severe than what is going on in Britain, but the banding together of asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and immigrants in political language and treating them all as the same problem, as Brazer seems to, gives people on the street the excuse to accuse anyone is who is not British of being behind the country’s challenges. The British government needs to stop looking for people to blame and take on the burden of responsibility, or the social upheavals they are desperate to avoid will only be exasperated.