The Slum

If the government does not step in to improve the situation by providing decent housing to peoplen we will witness an escalation of rent revolts in the slum areas.

A year ago, led by their community leaders among them politician Yunus Ali, some Nubian people, who have been squatting in Kibera area for the last 100 years, held a peaceful demonstration in the precincts of the Central High Courts in Nairobi.

They were agitating to be accepted as Kenyans. The history of how the Nubian people came to live in Kibera, brings into fore two fundamental issues: The origin of slums in the city and the ever sensitive and politicised issue of land ownership within the city environs.

Subsequently and inevitably, the history of urban settlement and their attendant problems cannot be told without referring to Kibera squatter settlement.

The Nubian people were settled in the city of Nairobi at the start of the 20^th century, as “guests” of the British Empire, for whom they had been fighting in World War (I) as part of the Kenya African Rifles (KAR).

Thus, unlike the other city slums the "slumisation" of Kibera did not follow the usual pattern of push and pull factors and the perpetual problems of housing and sheltering in emergent cities.

In the 50's, at the height of state of emergency imposed by the colonial government, many Kenyan bachelors began streaming into the city, drawn by the lure of the paid wage labour in Nairobi. The opportunities in the city and the disruption of the rural economic activities by the colonial government, lead to the ghettoisation of the Nairobi city, via the rural-urban migration.

After independence in 1963, there was a landslide of rural-urban migration. As the colonial pass, which had "regulated" the flow of the migration, was removed, the government was unable to match the flow of people, and without a clear housing policy, the inevitable happened: the shelter-less people erected semi-permanent structures in the government trust lands.

The emergence of Korogocho, Mathare Valley and Mukuru kwa Njenga––some of the earliest slum dwellings in the city, is a result of these push and pull factors. In recent years the sprawling slums colonies in the city have been the site of tenant upheavals.

The tenants have raised up in revolt against their long time partners, the landlords, simultaneously accusing them of levying "unreasonably high" rents. At the centre of the so-called "rent revolts", is of course the fundamental question of land tenureship. And, because the land issue has largely informed Kenyan politics, inevitably and invariably, local (land) politics is inter-linked with the uprising.

In Grogan slum locality, located in the larger Korogocho slum colony, the tenants were forced by the landlords to abandon their mud and roof leaking 10 by 10 structures because they could no longer afford the rising rents.

Still, high rents notwithstanding, tenants in the slum areas are faced with the dilemma of investing and developing the piece of land they squat in. As they do not own and/or do not ever hope to own the land they are reluctant to do anything on or with the land. This invariably explains why many structures in the slum areas – apart from the ones erected on land owned by their owners – are always semi-permanent and look like they are going to collapse any minute.

In 1997, a government policy paper on squatter settlements in urban areas was signed by the then Minister of Lands and Settlements, Noah Katana Ngala, who said "Although the exercise (of identifying areas of allotments and issuance of title deeds) is a mammoth one and will probably take sometime to complete, good progress has been registered overall”.

Seven years later, the situation is not any different. The slum tenants are still squatters on the land where they live. And the landlords are not relenting their quest to increase rents. They argue that the marketisation of the economy should be let to permeate in all sectors.

This can only mean one thing: if the government does not step in to improve the situation by providing decent housing to people, then we are going to witness an escalation of rent revolts in the slum areas.