Urban rights: Nairobi's dual story of renewal and decay

Aerial view of Nairobi CBD

It is now recognised that about 22 per cent of Kenyans reside in urban areas. The ratio is however not statistic. Rather, estimates suggest that the four urban areas where this surge is evident are Nakuru, Nairobi, Kisumu and Mombasa.

Today, let us speak about Nairobi that is celebrating 119 years. The ‘struggle for Nairobi is as old as its beginning. It is a complex, abstract and personal struggle that various writers have characterised with a history of violence, apathy, betrayal, despair and confusion. The problem with Nairobi is not so much its geographic location. Rather, the problem is the social function and planning that discriminates and alienates the majority. Let’s go back into history a little.

Until after 1940, only African men were allowed to reside in the city as servants. When one was without employment, they were asked to leave or deported to the rural reserves ‘where they belonged’. The servant served at the behest of the master and so the bedroom of the employer was called ‘master bedroom’.

This link of housing with power was not by mere coincidence. Rather, it was an expression of a racialised framework of relationships that formed the foundation of Nairobi. This base has historical link to the 1910 Master and Servant Ordinance - a colonial statute that defined the place of the African worker as a servant who would occupy the fringes of the city. 

But it is the informal settlements that have become servant settlements.  There has therefore been continuity rather than change of colonial urban development discourse that established Nairobi as a city segregated on the basis of class and race.

Findings of a city-wide survey conducted by Pamoja Trust attest that most informal settlements in Nairobi are built on public land, which was either held directly by the Government or by the municipal authorities. Plots were allocated to individuals by means of either a temporary occupancy licence or letter from the local administration.  The individuals then would have the permission to erect a temporary structure on the property, but did not have any tenure rights. 

While local governments thus allocated temporary rights in these lands to individuals, from 1964-1970 official government policy favoured the demolition of the informal settlements.  In practice some settlements were allocated land and protected where this was politically expedient for the authorities or politicians in question, while others were demolished.  Each demolition, though, led to the proliferation of new slums elsewhere. 

As residential areas of those who were clients of the ruling political elite, the slums become settlements of great political significance in the urban areas. To date the majority of voters in Nairobi reside in slums.

The State’s response to the slums phenomenon has over time been mixed and lukewarm. It has been characterised by an oscillation between indifference and eviction. Urbanist Jane Weru argues that the local and central government only changed their overall response strategy to the squatters question with the growing land scarcity, and as a response to the intensive pressure from commercialisation.

Another dimension that must not escape analysis is that most of the land settled by the urban poor is either public, community, railways or in some cases private land. In any case, there are several cases where public land already occupied by the poor changed hands as part of the broader political exigency.

Lately, the investment of billions of shillings under the urban renewal programme has gone hand-in-hand with renewed evictions and dispossession of the majority poor. There is no doubt that as long as Nairobi and its managers do not advance the rights and dignity of inhabitants who are poor, the so-called renewal shall be a mirage.

- The writer is Executive Director of Pamoja Trust.