St Vincent's

Kibera slum in Nairobi, often touted as the largest slum in Africa, sits in a picturesque valley that represents the rift between the hot savannah of the plains below and the rising foothills of Kenya’s highlands. Kibera itself represents the rift between urban and rural, rich and poor, and many other schisms that divide Kenya as a country. St Vincent’s Nursery is located in Olympic, and many of the children come of Gatwekera village in Kibera. These two neighbourhoods have a strong presence of communities that come from the mostly rural Western Kenya and as such many of these families characterise Kenya’s divisions as they have often been split in half so that one branch of the family can search for fortune in the city. This factor, and other strains that come with living in Kibera, often lead to dysfunctional families and children inevitably become the biggest victims of this knock on effect.  When 50% of the 800,000 inhabitants of Kibera are children, a potential social disaster is never far away.

Plenty of NGO’s have come into Kibera to try and make changes. Many view the nature of the slum as the essence of most of the problems – if it were developed into legitimate housing the issues of poor sanitation, crime, illegal breweries, prostitution and unemployment would disappear. But Kibera is not going to change dramatically any time soon, and in fact its very nature is what ensures that obtaining a Kibera dwelling demands large amounts of hustling. Kibera is central, with relatively good facilities and sanitation (compared to other Nairobi slums) and since the post-election violence in 2008 many inhabitants don’t pay any rent at all. Bull-dozing and rebuilding Kibera would just shift the slum somewhere else less central, less hygienic and with a thinner web of the society which currently makes life in Kibera possible. But even if the resolve to develop Kibera were there, would it be logistically possible when most of it is built on the steep slopes of a muddy river bank?

The NGO interventions that are working in Kibera are the ones that accept Kibera for what it is, or at least accept that change will only really come from within. It is what is within Kibera that is important, its people and its community - and strengthening the ties of community is the most crucial work that can be done. In my opinion no organisation does this in a better way than St Vincent’s. Children who come from challenging backgrounds learn very quickly at St Vincent’s that it is possible to be cherished and nurture their talents. The holistic approach to education and up-bringing, exemplified through the school, the rescue centre and the scholarship programme, ensures that no child is ever left out or misses out on an opportunity to achieve their potential. Most importantly they discover that they are all vital members of their society and that they are able to contribute positively. This is not taught by books but by example; all members of the St Vincent staff are based locally and none of them are adequately compensated for the work they do, so the children learn from them how to have a desire to give back. When the St Vincent children join the remaining 400,000 of their generation who are growing up here, it will be they, not government bull-dozers, who bring Kibera into a thriving future.

To support St Vincent's through Global Giving click here https://www.globalgiving.org/donate/3353/st-vincent-de-paul-community-development-organization/ 

Land Reform in Kenya

It is hard to get lost in London nowadays. GPS can tell you what side of the road you are on. If you miss it come to Kibera and I will get you lost within 15 minutes. Another place where you can easily get lost in Kenya is anywhere flat in Nyanza Province. This is what happened to me while trying to walk from Lwak village to Kamito in Asembo. I had two hours to kill before I needed to be in Kamito and although the boda boda drivers couldn’t understand what I was doing I turned down their invitations to join them on the back of their bike in favour of the well-trodden path.

When you get off the road, Nyanza is a maze of millions of one acre farms all interconnected with non-sequitur paths and hedgerows; a washing place here, a thatched hut there and every so often the moo of a cow that ambushes you from behind. When you can see your destination in the distance you have a hope of reaching it, even though you might well be put off course by a surprise swamp or a ploughed field which is keen not to be disturbed. When it is flat you have no hope.  Even though they were not used to seeing an odiero wandering around shambas asking for directions, there was no element of hostility from the Luo’s who plot by plot guided me to Kamito. For my part I was not used to asking which tree or plume of smoke I should aim for as my next landmark – something they are probably quite accustomed to. 

The muddle of the shambas is intrinsic to Luo and Kenyan culture. There is a strong sense of ancestral inheritance of the land but that does not mean it can’t be shared in many ways. There are no barbed wire fences to prohibit trespassers and unless you have grown up knowing there is no way of telling each family’s plot from another.  Each farmer will share and barter what he has to his advantage – land is for grazing one year in place of land for arable the next. Work animals and labour are rented out when they are in excess and hired the next season when in high demand. This breeds a strong sense of community and interdependence. 

However, underneath the surface a lack of trust and a fear of letting go means farmers such as these are facing increasing levels of poverty. Most farmers in Nyanza are subsistence farmers who generate extra income by selling excess harvest and working on neighbouring farms in peak season. Therefore for many their only tangible asset is their land, yet often there is nothing on paper that gives them the right to that land. In traditional Luo culture, a chief or ‘weg lowo’ would act as patron to large areas of land that had diverse soil types and terrains and he would lease it out to families who wanted to specialise in working that kind of terrain – often the terms for the these leases could be in the form of livestock or labour. In the 1950’s after many centuries of long term leases an unpaid adjudication committee was set up to register land to one individual or another and naturally the winners in such a system were the ones who could provide the biggest informal payment to the committee. As a result many farmers decided not to alert land transactions to the committee and just conducted deals amongst themselves. After a short time the registered title deeds fell out of sync with local understanding of who owned what land.

As Kenya modernised, this disparity created more and more opportunities for exploitation. People used the committees to acquire title deeds for land which they were not occupying and blamed the disorganisation of the system if there were any complaints. When there weren’t complaints these title deeds could be used as collateral on a loan, or even sold to multiple buyers at once in front of different members of the committees. By the mid 1980’s, when corruption in Kenya was at a peak, very few subsistence farmers trusted the title deed system at all, and over time there was a campaign for recognition of ‘customary ownership’ of land, enabling the potential for complications to increase further.  By the end of 2012, up to 75 per cent of landin Kenya was unregistered 

Although not fool-proof, the safest way of holding rights over inherited land is to occupy it. This does not just mean farm it, but also live on it and bury your dead in it. In traditional culture, each son must build his own hut in the compound while still a teenager, and then when he marries he should set up his own compound outside the perimeter of his father’s space. Within two generations, 25 houses may have been built around the original one, constituting a mini village. The maze I stumbled upon was effectively several of these mini villages which over time have merged together to form a mega shamba complex. This could be OK if all the gardens and small fields could be used efficiently, but often the open space is actually a dedicated burial ground for the ancestors.

The consequence of this over-population of the rural areas of Kenya has led to massive migration to Nairobi (I havewritten before about why they come to Nairobi instead of other cities). However, this is not helping to develop Nyanza which still lags far behind most other provinces. For example, Nyanza is the province with the highestprevalence of HIV, domestic violence, and child mortality, and 63% of the population are living in poverty.

Nyanza is not famous for having the most productive land in Kenya, but if farmed efficiently it has potential to feed the whole region.  It is not possible to farm the land efficiently if it is becoming more and more congested with huts and graveyards. People need to congest their living quarters into centralised areas (such as towns) and common burial grounds need to be allocated at affordable prices. As part of co-operatives or larger private businesses, workers commute daily to work in the fields from this urbanised location, which in itself becomes an opportunity for new businesses, services and general economic development. Meanwhile the land can provide anywhere between 5 – 20 times the crop it yielded when farmed inefficiently with poor resources. Of course, this is not a new argument and I am no expert in it so I will not discuss it further, but anyone in the ‘peasant romantic’ wing should read this blog by Duncan Green and consider that the land reform I am referring to is a model that was adopted across the industrialised world, starting with Sweden in the 1700’s. (see)

For this land reform to occur, title deeds will need to be exchanged, and/or people will need to be happy to not live on and bury their dead in the land that they own. This is something that was recognised in Kenya’s vision 2030, completed in 2008, and elevated in the new constitution of 2010. It was for this reason that the constitution stipulated the establishment of a strong independent commission that would wipe the slate clean on land rights and clarify the rights of land-owners. (http://www.klrc.go.ke/index.php/constitution-of-kenya/117-chapter-five-land-and-environment/part-1-land/234-67-national-land-commission) Its independence was a vital attribute as land grabbing had been clearly associated with the politicians who were closest to the ministry of lands and it was seen that ending the corruption could not be done from the inside.

This suggestion was supported a few weeks ago when an independent audit was called without warning for the Ministry of Lands. The independent audit found no less than one million files that had mysteriously disappeared while on the same day staff from the ministry were caught and arrested for sneaking title deeds out of the building. But to be strong is just as vital an attribute. The National Land Commission has pledged to create three million title deeds for Kenyans in the next five years, and these title deeds must be undisputed and unduplicated.  

The NLC has said that to be strong it needs a budget of Sh14.8 billion, but instead it was given just Sh 779 million. For this it has to rely on the Ministry of Lands that administers the budget. Despite considering themselves their ‘mother ministry’, Ministry of Lands insists that the NLC should no longer operate within Ardhi House and should not be overstepping its mandate but issuing title deeds but should exist to offer advice to the ministry  and offer other roles delegated by the government. This has led to a stand-off and increasing delays in the issuance of title deeds.

The recent war between the National Land Commission and the Ministry of Lands (above) shows that this administration does not want the NLC to be strong, and in effect this means that they are less interested in pursuing Vision 2030 than increasing their own power. To make this point clearer, the president paid a visit to the ministry in what was slated as a sign of solidarity with the minister Charity Ngilu. This stance will ensure that Nyanza and other congested rural areas of Kenya will remain poor with all the effects that come with it.

In her chapter on land reform in her book ‘The Challenge for Africa’, Wangari Maathai writes this: ‘I would like to see not poor farmers scrambling to produce tea or cassava on a piece of land that long ago lost its productivity, but rather cooperatives that provide farmers with accurate and timely information about their crops… The government will need to make a commitment to rooting out corruption in parastatal agencies that further exploit and impoverish small farmers.’  She did not live to see it, and it is still a long way off, but it will never happen in Kenya if the National Land Commission is not strong and independent.

An Unlikely Faith

Of all the motivations in people’s lives, compassion and greed are usually thought to inhabit opposite ends of a spectrum. Thomas à Kempis identifies vanity to be the contrast to compassion, because compassion brings out the full extent of humility and generosity while vanity is all that is self-obsessed, including the pursuit of wealth, glory and power for the sake of power.

When we see all the suffering in the world it is easy for anyone to feel compassion for our fellow humans but using that compassion as the motivation for our lives is much harder. I do not believe that people turn to greed and other vanities because they cannot feel compassion and shock at wrong doings, but because they believe there is nothing they can really do about it, and therefore they might as well deny it. Living in East Africa has unfortunately made it much easier to see why people would think that way, and very often I feel the same.  What is scary is that right here right now, people have far more opportunities to make a positive change motivated by their compassion than they do in other parts of the world such as North Korea, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Eastern Congo – or at other times for that matter such as under Idi Amin in Uganda and Arap Moi in Kenya.

After the new constitution was signed in Kenya in 2010 there was a tangible sense of hope- a belief that this country is on the up. Apparently this has been reminiscent of Moi’s ousting in 2002 and even independence in 1963. There was a determination that the 2013 elections would be peaceful and when they duly were there was a sense of national self-congratulation and pride in a country that was really ‘developing’ in the right direction. This feeling still exists in Kenya, despite the government’s best efforts to derail it (more on that another time), and it is the feeling of positivity and change for the better above all else that makes me happy to live in Kenya.

But even in this relatively positive environment I can’t help feeling that greed is winning and those who try to fight it are fighting in vain.  Globally we are proud of improving human rights in the last sixty years, but are we really moving in the right direction? The gap between the rich and poor is always growing and the poorest billion people on the planet are being left behind, largely because of a greedy nationalistic stance taken by ‘developed’ countries, and mostly by the rich in those countries. Now in Europe those from the rest of the world who have been left behind are being treated with increasing animosity when they try to seek asylum or opportunities in a richer place. In Kenya, the same trend is being reciprocated on a national scale: the rich are getting richer and the physical divide between the rich and poor areas is becoming ever more pronounced.  Freedom of movement is being restricted, not just for refugees (as would unfortunately be expected) but also for the rural poor who are being offered far less social mobility than they deserve. On a community level, a lack of faith in a system that condemns the poor to subservience leads to entrepreneurs preferring to cater to an informal market which does not promote an inclusive community but instead promotes divisions and further inequality. The lack of trust in daily lives has fuelled a lack of trust in families and personal relationships – over 50% of children growing up in Nairobi slums are from dysfunctional families, and there has been a marked rise in domestic violence in Kenya in the last 20 years (see http://odieromondi.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-are-women-in-kenya-getting-their.html)

In this pyramid, power and greed plays its role at every level. Men in Kibera have the power to beat their wives into doing all the housework and the youth of the slum can harass the more vulnerable into filling their pockets, yet they are oppressed by the government who do not recognise many of their rights (police have recently been given the freedom to ‘shoot to kill’ these gangsters at will). Even the Kenyan politicians must be subservient to a global system that is interested in keeping Kenya poor. Many of them might not be allowed to travel to Europe even if they wanted to because Europeans are unwilling to share or lose any more of what they have.

If you have compassion for your neighbours and their oppression and try to do something about it, it does not mean that you will not be oppressed anyway, so it makes more sense to join in the system. However you might try to help, at some point it will be undone by corruption and greed at a higher level.

Somehow, many people refuse to live under this spell. Yesterday on the way to the Easter service I saw a young man in his mid-twenties running with his five year old daughter to get to church in time to get a seat. She was dressed in a shiny purple dress and he was wearing a smart shirt with a rosary round his neck. Their shoes were covered in mud as it had rained hard during the night and they had just navigated the muddy tracks of Kibera. For this scene to have taken place a number of unlikely things must have happened. A young man who became a father in his late teens has decided to commit to his family; he had decided to spend what must be a huge proportion of his salary on his daughters dress; he had got up on possibly his only day off in weeks at 7.30 am in order to get to church on time – and then run with his daughter so that she got a good view of the service.  The church was full of such people. It was not occupied by people who have been bred all their lives to go to church on Easter Sunday and continue to do so under pressure of ‘Catholic guilt’, but people of all ages who have a faith that a system of greed and oppression is not the only way. At the end of the service a spontaneous cheer went round the building – not the climactic wailing I dread in some services – but the kind of applause you get at the end of a football game when your team has won the league, the tension is freed, and the celebrations can begin.

These people are sure that in fact they are right to invest in hope, but where they get this idea is a mystery. The logic says that following greed and vanities is far more lucrative and beneficial, especially if you are living in a challenging environment like Kibera. Instead they are allowing compassion for their neighbours to motivate their lives and it seems to me that they are happy about it. Can this be dismissed as delusion?

If this blog interests you I would highly recommend reading a couple of blogs by my colleague Stephen on solidarity and suffering. http://muzungualihomba.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/solidarity/ and the follow up http://muzungualihomba.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/suffering-and-solidarity-some-more-thoughts/

Observations of a Slum Tourist 4: Olympic Opportunities

‘Human Traffic’ is the phrase often used to describe the thorough-fare that runs from Olympic bus stage past Olympic Primary School down into Kibera slum. The growing potholes that are making their stamp on this road are more the result of over ten thousand daily foot passengers than abuse from car tires. Any cars that venture this way must accept that going faster than walking pace is impossible and as a result few do. Another reason is that not many people have cars. This may sound obvious, but Kibera manages to fit a disputed 800,000 residents within 2.5 square miles, and there still seems to be space for all our cars.

 

When Olympic Estate was completed in 1975, each compound was designed with space for parking. The government scheme, which was designed to off-set the expansion of Kibera with organized housing, gave middle class Kenyans the opportunity to buy property that was linked up to the national amenities of water, sewerage and electricity. Cheap loans were made available for certain people to buy the houses at affordable prices and many of them immediately let them out, making a 100% return on investment within two years. Others divided up the compounds into smaller plots and in recent years landlords have demolished the original structures and built multi-story buildings consisting of several one-bedroom apartments. All this has had an impact on the amount of parking space available. However, the dividing up of plots has also meant that the relevant average income of Olympic residents has declined in the last two decades. A family living in a single bedroom apartment is less likely to be able to afford a car now, than the original tenants of the estate who were renting large compounds for themselves in the 1980’s.

 

The prevalence of human traffic over four-wheeled traffic has also had an impact on the pavements. Since the roads are used by amblers, the pavements now make ideal sites for makeshift shops for these amblers to peruse. Demand for such an obvious economic benefit has been matched by a dwindling of resistance; as the tarmac on the roads has slowly decayed, so has the determination of any party insistent on preventing these iron sheet shop fronts from popping up. They go up overnight and by morning they had always been there.  This trend has been escalating since the post-election violence in 2008, Kibera’s darkest hour in living memory, when it became clear that the inhabitants here run their own laws subject to no outside influences. The original landlords, who may have held more pride in their middle class estate and resisted these temporary structures, were largely chased out of town at this time for being from the wrong tribe and many have never returned.

All this would lead you to the conclusion that Kibera is swallowing Olympic, and on initial exposure that is often the reaction. However, that would be to deny the opportunities that present themselves in Olympic when you look a little closer. The main thing to remember is location. Kibera is prime real estate because if you have the resolve you can walk to work in the central business district and thereby saving yourself 2000 KSH (£15) per month. For those who do travel by bus, it should take less than half the time to get to town than it might if you live in other affordable areas of town. Ngong road is set to be widened within the next two years which will further cut down commuting times and on Ngong Road you get everything you need. If a linking road is made to the new by-pass south of Kibera it will give fantastic access to the west of Kenya. This means that Olympic is a very convenient place to live

The growing population should also be seen as an opportunity.  All basic day to day goods can be found in Olympic, but from the small temporary shops described above. Since these shops continue to grow in number it must mean that demand is there, and growing. However, multiple shops selling the same goods is not a formula for efficiency and actually limits the economic growth in the area. If larger, more permanent establishment could be commissioned and financed it could create even more jobs for the area in the long run. My reasoning is this: one-man-band shops do not rely on an economic ecosystem to survive- they just buy their products from travelling salesmen or buy them wholesale themselves, and then sell them direct to customers. A larger enterprise such as a supermarket would need other services such as store designers and engineers, security guards, and till managers. Such an ecosystem could create business for other industries such as local advertising agencies, carpenters and metal workers. The larger establishments could bring down the price of day to day consumables through economy of scale, which is of benefit to the whole community. If the temporary shops lose business, then at least many jobs would have already been created. However, their proprietors needn’t go out of work as long as they are innovative: a growing population brings a wide array of different business opportunities and demand for specialized goods. Therefore, Olympic provides countless opportunities for business minded people.

Let’s take as another example the ten tiny pubs lined up in the north side of the ring road need their own fridges, sound systems, bar staff and in some cases night security guards. If they could join forces and open a large club like Garage or Big Five in Fort Jesus resources could be pooled new attractions could be invested in that bring in more customers from outside, such as kitchens, pool tables, bigger TV screens and live bands. For this to happen though business men in Olympic need to be prepared to team up and trust each other.

Considering the exciting opportunities in Olympic it is surprising that housing prices are not escalating. Just a kilometre away in Jamuhuri, property is up to three times as expensive both to buy and to rent. But a few hundred metres away in the slum housing is almost ten times cheaper than in Olympic Estate. A year in to the new government’s tenure there are no obvious signs that the explode pressure of the slum is relenting, and it is not clear whether new policies will have the desired effects. Olympic is seen as a buffer zone between developed Nairobi and the unruly slum, ready to swing one way or another and until there is evidence of a clear swing in the right direction people are unwilling to invest in its property or infrastructure. As inhabitants it is up to us to make that decision, nobody is going to do it for us, and for that we need to be prepared to work together.