From Africa Recovery, Vol.15 #1-2, page 35

Land rights campaign in Nairobi

Squatters fight for their homes

By Rasna Warah*, Nairobi

Shortly after dark one night, a Molotov cocktail descended on a squatter community on the northeastern outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya's capital city. Fortunately, the 2,000 or so residents were not asleep and no lives were lost. But they lost everything else they owned, including beds, stools, clothes and crockery. The fire was no accident. Like many arson attacks on informal settlements in the country, it was meant as a warning -- leave or die.

"Squatters across the country live in perpetual fear of being evicted by the authorities or private developers," says Mr. Othello Gruduah of the East African Standard, a local daily. "Like a feeding deer with an ear to the ground just in case a predator lurks nearby, the peace of the squatters is temporary. They are refugees -- a people on the move in their own country with nowhere to lay their heads."

Yet, squatters and slum dwellers comprise the majority of Nairobi's 2.3 million residents. Recent statistics indicate that 60 per cent of the city's population -- 1.4 million people -- reside in the over 100 slum and squatter communities scattered on the fringes and within the city. Most are crowded onto less than 5 per cent of the total residential land in the city.

Poor and overcrowded

"Kenyan slums, and particularly those in Nairobi, are arguably among the worst in Africa," says a report by Matrix Development Consultancy, a local research firm.

Photo: UN Chronicle / Horst Rutsch

Comparable perhaps only to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) or the pavement dwellings of Mumbai (India), Nairobi's slums are among the most dense, unsanitary and insecure in the world. The most common dwelling is one room accommodating an average of four-six people. Densities average 250 units per hectare. Urban services, if they are provided at all, are extremely basic, consisting of earth roads and paths, earth drains, communal water points and pit latrines, each shared by as many as 60 people.

Renting by the room is the most common form of house tenure, accounting for about 80 per cent of residents. Security of tenure is precarious; evictions, often violent, occur at the whim of the structure or land owner.

The root of the problem, say housing rights activists, is a failure of the government to adequately address the urban land issue. Informal settlements are often not recognized as inhabited areas by the authorities, with the result that they can be alienated at any time. Because the land on which the squatters and slum dwellers live is potentially valuable real estate, "land grabbing" (irregular allocation or sale of public land to individuals or organizations that have proved their loyalty to the state apparatus) is extremely common.

Fighting back

However, the slum dwellers are now fighting back. In the mid-1990s, slum dwellers in Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city, organized themselves into a federation to present a unified voice against forced evictions and land grabbing. In July 2000, the Federation of Slum Dwellers, or Muungano wa Wanavijiji, launched an urban land rights campaign that demands, among other things, secure and permanent tenure for residents of informal settlements.

Ms. Jane Weru, the executive director of Pamoja Trust, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that works with federations of slum dwellers in Kenya, believes that the movement will not only force the government to revise property and land rights in the country, but will also provide slum dwellers with an opportunity to have a dialogue with the state.

The Nairobi-based UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) has initiated a project to facilitate this type of dialogue, the Global Campaign for Secure Tenure, launched last year. It aims to directly address the issue of urban poverty and exclusion by arguing that secure tenure is one of the most important catalysts in stabilizing communities and helping cities leverage corporate and individual investment. The campaign is designed to link international development agencies and governments with communities and their activities.

Improving slums

The campaign will need not only the political will of governments, but of urban citizens as well. Ms. Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Habitat's executive director, says that the campaign's agenda can only work if the value system of urban society is transformed. Slums, or "spontaneous settlements," as she calls them, are the result of a system that tolerates homelessness and exclusion. Reaffirming the UN Millennium Summit's pledge to improve the lives of at least 1 billion slum dwellers by 2020, Ms. Tibaijuka has already begun promoting slum improvement initiatives around the world, in collaboration with the World Bank and other donors.

In Nairobi, Habitat has started working with the government on city development strategies for the metropolitan area. In November, Ms. Tibaijuka met with Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi, who agreed to pursue a joint slum-upgrading project in the city. The president is patron of a high level inter-governmental committee which is seeking to confront the problems of informal settlements on a citywide level, rather than simply improving individual slums. The project will entail a participatory process in which the slum dwellers, their organizations and their alliances with NGOs take a leadership role. Habitat will facilitate these partnerships and will promote exchanges between government officials and slum dwellers. Habitat also will collaborate with Slum Dwellers International, a growing network of local and grassroots initiatives in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, to facilitate exchanges between African and Asian cities.

"As custodians of the Habitat Agenda, Habitat is well placed to help governments and the international community to meet the goal of improving the lives of slum dwellers," says Ms. Tibaijuka. "We have a responsibility to ensure that our children inherit cities without fear, towns with houses and homes, and villages full of hope."

Related articles:
[ African cities under strain ]
[ Nakuru, Kenya: Cleaning a town, from the ground up ]
[ Senegal experiments with decentralization ]

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