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.