Slums, the enemy within: Part 2, Skeptics and cynics
By: David A. Smith
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
As we saw yesterday, the first new development in the Kibera slum upgrading has finally broken ground, nearly eight years after initial conception.
The former is supposed to be replaced by the latter
Background: A while ago [Early September – Ed.], Kenya’s newspaper The East African Standard published a great and extensive series on the proposed upgrading of Kibera: Africa’s largest slum, which I visited in 2005.
Kibera in 2005: photo taken during my visit
The articles covered community resistance in the Standard, Kenya, the indignity of having no toilets, slumlord exploitation, slumdweller fears, an idealist’s critique, the power of savings, the potential to reform building codes, and an editorial endorsing affordable housing (which the Standard mistakenly but understandably calls ‘rent control’). Woven throughout the series were the main themes that show why slums, though hard to eradicate, are also hard to upgrade.
It takes that long because slum upgrading, in addition to being expensive, complex, and risky for government, faces enemies within, starting with the skeptics, cynics, and fearful:
Some slum dwellers say they will not move to new houses constructed a few metres away, despite being charged a modest rent of Sh 1,000.
And they are giving all sorts of reasons –– some hilarious and others baffling –– to justify their defiance.
Kibera in 2005: Francis Umunde, savings group leader
Of the residents’ reasons, fear is uppermost, and fear need not be rational:
Some claim their children would contract waterborne diseases once they move to clean houses.
Such a fear maybe nonsense, but it comes from somewhere, and as we’ll see in tomorrow’s posts, there are plenty of people willing to encourage others’ fears.
Others say they are [so] accustomed to squalor life in Kibera that they would not know how to live differently.
Poverty creates a curious kind of dependency – that of the familiar. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home sounds to us a homily, yet it conceals within our belief that we do not ‘deserve’ a better condition, that there must be some trick or hidden test, and we will fail it. We saw entrenched distrust in American HOPE VI public housing redevelopments; we see it here in Kibera.
Kibera in 2005: eco9nomic empowerment, co-op office
They also fear they might not find affordable schools for their children since most of those in Kibera are sponsored.
Fear of the unknown. Distrust of anyone in apparent authority who provides reassurance.
They say other fuels like kerosene, gas or electricity are out of reach.
Fear of hidden increased costs. This is more rational, so you cannot heat or cook by a wood fire if your apartment is a concrete mid-rise.
Traders say they will lose their livelihood.
03: Ms Jane Ngoiyo, who has lived in Kibera for 30 years, is worried about her grocery business
Fear of disrupting their personal cryptobiotica: the delicate web of their economic lives.
Josphat Mondia, 28, calls the decanting site ‘
“Life in Kibera is cheap. With Sh50 you can eat three meals in a day and sleep. That can’t happen at the location. There, you won’t get sukuma wiki or tomatoes worth Sh5.”
Mr. Mondia’s fears are a tangle: some plausible, some unlikely, some paranoid:
“Again, I feel the Sh1,000 rental fee is just a bait and will be increased progressively, eventually forcing us out of the houses when we default,” he said.
That’s just paranoid. Why would the government, even a corrupt one, want to give people higher-value houses, only to take them away later? Unlike Dharavi, it’s not as though the land on which Kibera sits has enormous redevelopment potential.
Mondia, who was born in Soweto East, says he knows no other home and would want to remain at the village all his life.
Again the psychological dependency of poverty: it is too painful to imagine a better life that will be snatched from you; psychologically safer is to doubt its existence. After all, when no one official in your life has ever been trustworthy, it’s understandable that you would not trust the government – especially if a majority of structure owners are civil servants, as they are in Kibera.
He said his children might fall ill with waterborne diseases once they move, ‘which is unheard of in Kibera’. “Watapata cholera na watoto wa Kibera huwa hawapati haya magonjwa (our children will be infected with cholera and other diseases unheard of in Kibera),” he says.
Kibera in 2005: the main thoroughfare of Soweto East
Mondia also says unlike in Kibera where there are many donor-sponsored schools, at the new site, parents will be forced to part with Sh5,000 every term.
Fear of the unknown. Fear of the irreversible. What makes him think that? Fear. Who starts such rumors?
“That is like burying me alive,” he says.
Mr. Mondia may not have heard the answers, or he may have disbelieved them. No one can overcome disbelief and doubt in an instant.
Kibera in 2005: Warning slum dwellers not to buy illegal spirits
Philip Kiliswa, 40, who works as a security guard in the city centre, is opposed to the shifting because it will move him further from his workplace, yet walks there.
Compared with the walk Mr. Kiliswa now makes, the distance increase in minimal.
He is sceptical that the project might turn out like the Highrise National Housing Corporation project in which Kibera residents had been promised housing units that were later taken up by outsiders.
I understand his skepticism. Given
02: Mr Cyrus Kimemia fears outsiders may take over the houses. [PHOTOS: ANN/STANDARD]
[Continued next week, on Thursday, Nove 5th, in Part 3.]
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