LONDON – Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, supposedly the world’s largest slum, home to 800,000 souls, is known for its “flying toilets”. With no sewerage system the inhabitants defecate into plastic bags, which are then thrown onto nearby wasteland.
How can it be, after billions of dollars of aid to Kenya, hundreds of reports on upgrading squatters’ settlements and the headquartering in Nairobi of the UN agency, Habitat, charged with urban improvement, that no one has built Kibera a sewerage system?
Most of the people I approached refused to accompany me to Kibera, known as a den of dirt and iniquity. Habitat didn’t respond to my e-mails. Finally a young man, a teacher of the Koran, agreed to show me the inside track. And so I made my first visit for 25 years. It was always bad. Now despite the signs outside a couple of shops advertising “second hand mobile phones from Sweden” it is much much worse, at least to look at and to smell. The technology that these people want – electricity lines, running water and sewerage systems – has not been forthcoming and while the garbage keeps piling up the death rate climbs as AIDS takes its toll. As I walk around I think of Kipling’s verse: “As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed/So it spreads/And above the packed and pestilential town/death looked down.”
That morning I had asked Wangethi Mwangi, the chief editor of the Nation newspaper group, why the government has never felt compelled to lift a finger. “Under the previous governments of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi these people were seen as part of the opposition whose votes would never go to the government whatever it did, so the conclusion was why bother with them. And now the new, supposedly reforming, government of President Mwai Kibaki is so inept that still nothing is being done.”
But amid the misery there are small signs of hope. I learnt about the many private schools that have been started where for a few shillings a day parents can send their children to learn the basics. I bend low through an archway off the main alley and enter a tiny courtyard surrounded by makeshift buildings. I pop my head into a classroom and the children turn round with big smiles and shout unprompted, “how are you?” I ask the teacher, Catherine Maingi, about the toilets. “Yes, we have them”. “Are they chemical ones?” “No, just holes we’ve dug in the ground.” “So where does it go?” “It just seeps away”. I don’t need to ask where. The ground falls away towards a tiny river where children splash and women wash their clothes.
The human spirit is an amazing force that can sprout in the most inhospitable terrain. A makeshift pipe of water taps a supply from mains a mile away. Boys herd goats. A carpenter I watch is making first class furniture. The small shops sell fruit and vegetables. There is even a bookseller. Unlike 25 years ago there are now dispensaries. They also dispense free condoms but behind the counter in one, Anne Leon tells me that men don’t use them although a surprisingly high 40% of women use modern contraceptive methods.
Within 20 minutes I am back in the heart of town, with its tall offices and hotels, its flowering flame trees, and smartly dressed civil servants, laughing self-confidently, pouring out of their offices at the end of the day. Is it simply as Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables that “there is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity among the higher?” I don’t quite believe it, for the previous 10 days as I have traveled around Tanzania and Uganda I have seen governments that have brought down the rate of poverty and suffering in the urban shanty towns at a cracking pace.
But in Kenya, once the great hope of East Africa, the politics is log jammed after years of misrule and corruption which have totally hollowed out the ability of the government machine to deliver what most people in their better moments would consider are the priorities.
For years the Western aid givers have threatened on and off to suspend aid if corruption is not dealt with. Only recently the U.S. announced it was withholding some of its aid following the resignation in frustration of the government’s anti-corruption tsar, John Githongo. The high hopes that were placed in the new democratically elected government wither for lack of presidential leadership. The cabinet fight publicly among themselves, already maneuvering for the next election in 2007. No one in the short term seems to have a solution. The potential of what could be a great country has been thrown away in a plastic bag.
