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Kenya's
bad smell of failure
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
April 28, 2005
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.
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
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