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.

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.

The Voiceless People of Eastleigh

After ten working days running cooped up in iHub it was a great sense of freedom when we set off to Eastleigh on the other side of Nairobi to give out the first edition of the Tamuka Newsletter. Eastleigh is the area of Nairobi that has witnessed all the bombs in recent times: A suicide bomber in August, Molotov cocktails thrown into a Sunday school session in September, and an exploding public bus in November. By December Eastleigh had become a riot zone that left dead bodies on the street for several days straight.

Al Shabaab have a very ingenious way of inciting violence. Eastleigh has a huge Somali population, but a huge proportion of these are Kenyan Somali. These are people who have lived in Kenya for generations and are as Kenyan as anyone can be. This means that the recent war between Kenya and Somalia has even less to do with them than it does with the innocent Somali refugees who have fled Somalia seeking refuge in Nairobi. Unfortunately this is a message that other Kenyan tribes find hard to swallow. By setting bombs in Eastleigh the terrorists play on the ignorance of Kenyans, who then turn on their Somali neighbours as if they were the enemy. Walking through busy Garissa Road made me see how inevitable this reaction was. People of Somali origin have laid claim to much of the area’s cultural identity, from the aroma of strong spices, to shops selling middle eastern rugs, mosques and shisha bars. While Bantu faces huddle in the corner watching with suspicion, gangs of tall thin men amble slowly down the pavements holding hands and combing their straight hair.

Eastleigh after a bomb in November

As we walked along chatting with overly extroverted hawkers it was hard to imagine these streets being the scene of such violence only a month ago. It was hard to believe that tomorrow, as parties choose their nominees for the elections, the energy was likely to heat up again. It was hard to imagine the stories of Somali refugees being stopped by police and arrested for being foreign. Yet on just this one road we were stopped by three people who told us the same story. The police had arrested them, torn up their UNHCR refugee mandate in front of them and taken them to jail, only to be released upon a bribe of 1000 shillings. Apparently these are often plain clothes policemen who would never perpetrate such an act in front of a mzungu witness.

The saddest part about this harassment is that it is supposed to be something of the past. Plenty of NGO’s have conducted sensitisation seminars with police to make sure that treat refugees in Eastleigh just as they would treat anyone else, and reports from the NGO’s and the refugees was that it was working. However, in December the outgoing government issued a directive that all 100,000 refugees living in Nairobi should return to the camps. Why? Because of the bombs. This is a security measure. Do refugees who have fled one country because of a war, now want to be the people to start a war in the country that is protecting them? So the police, who drop their reluctant support of integration amongst refugees and use this directive as an excuse to literally scare anyone of Somali, Congolese, Sudanese, Ethiopian or Rwandese origin out of the city.

And it is working. CDTD, an NGO that works in the community in Eastleigh ran a vocational school for 125 refugees last year. This term their numbers are under 30. But where are all these refugees going? Are they to be added to Dadaab’s 400,000 population, to eat their meals at an ordained time, live in ordained mud houses in ordained rows, and wait for another mundane day to pass slowly by? Or will they return to the countries they believe to be too unsafe for their family? It is a tragedy that refugees of all people are being used a political tool, while they have no voice and not even a vote to come back with.

Call to action: mzungus in Nairobi let’s go and patrol the streets of Eastleigh, as it seems we are an unwitting group who can prevent this police behaviour!

2. All refugees and anyone else: text your views and stories to 4342. It is free and anonymous and will be seen by anyone who follows @TamukaHub or @XavierProj on twitter.

K- Immigration

I first looked into the idea of getting a work permit in December. Now it’s July and i’ve just given up. The first shock was that as a ‘volunteer’ I had to pay £750 a year to the Immigration Board so I had to find a way to do that. Then I had to be endorsed  by my organisation – in my case since XP is not yet registered SV**CO – which entailed filling out about ten forms. The most important thing for me though was an endorsement letter from the NGO board saying that I should be granted an entry permit this required thirteen pieces of paperwork, including a copy of my ‘contract’ as a volunteer. The NGO board only assesses these applications once a month so it was April before the letter came out with a positive endorsement.

In April I submitted my application for a work permit at the Immigration Department, in Nyayo House. This intimidating building has legendary status as the venue for the torture of Raila Odinga during the Moi regime, and the echoing stairwells make it easy to imagine the screams coming from the basement. I don’t think it has been swept since Moi was president either and apparently it did once have water running in the toilets during those days. The officials stamped my passport giving me three more months to process the payment and wait for the final approval from the board. Three months is designed to be excessive but of course on July 7^th I had to have it extended for another month because of delays.

On the day I submitted my application I was the last customer in the building (very eerie) and aisle 9 closed without giving me a reference number. This would be a source of consternation for me as each time I returned to check on the progress of my application (twice) I was told that I must have a reference number, and if I didn’t I was a liar, and Kenya doesn’t like liars.

The day I picked up my approval (without a reference number(, I was told that all I needed to do was pay my 100,000 KES (£750) along with a bank bond from my bank for the same amount (first time I’d heard about that – what is a bank bond anyway?)

In the bank I was told that a bank bond will take two weeks to process and I also needed a form 19 from Immigration. It was already 4pm so I thought  I would return the next day to get form 19.

Guess what the next day was the day they decided to implement the new constitution which constituted that the new fee was not £750 but £1500. ‘But I was here yesterday, no-one told me the charges were about to double’ – ‘Oh sorry about that, but don’t worry your permit was approved before the changes so you probably won’t have to pay’ – ‘Are you sure?’ – ‘Um you go to room 24/15/18/27 and check with them’. In room 27 they told me they would be sure by next Monday.

So next Tuesday (today) I went back and this time went to rooms 18/28/24 and a room without a number (definitely the torture chamber) but still I was refused an answer. In the end it was the cashier in aisle 9 who told me that I would ABSOLUTELY have to pay the new price and that if I couldn’t afford it it’s OK I just have to give up and go back to UK.

Luckily I’m going home anyway but I have a feeling that my relationship with Nyayo house is only just beginning.