Oh no, slums are migrating and taking over villages!

They are referred to as informal settlements, as if political correctness can camouflage the stench of poor governance, open sewers, grinding poverty, hopelessness and shattered dreams from the word ‘slum’.

Only the worst could emerge from them, we heard. It is as if subsisting in a mud-walled hovel baked one’s brains. Slums, experts warned, subjected parental DNA to radiation and caused genes to mutate, giving forth twisted zombies with a penchant for sexual debauchery, substance abuse and mindless savagery.

So when we woke up to shocking newspaper headlines like ‘Tens die after drinking spree’, we shook our heads and wondered what those crazy sods would be up to next as the news anchor breathlessly announced, “In other news...”

Slums apparently imprinted such an ugly scar on national consciousness that a whole raft of local NGOs, backed by international do-gooders and passionate hippy-looking foreigners, lopped over endless sludge-filled trenches daily, fighting to swat away the cancer of rot before it swallowed up entire cities.

As we speak, there is a big plan to flatten slums and move their wretched dwellers to formal settlements. We want them to pay for electricity, water and rent. We want them to defaecate in toilets like normal human beings, even if their income dictates otherwise.

In the meantime, the village has always been the picture of calm and serenity — a place associated with solid relationships, happy grandmas, security, fresh air, fresh vegetables and kienyeji chicken.

But while we were fixated with slums, the ground shifted. These days, when a man impregnates a goat or slashes his four sons to death, that news doesn’t waft in from Korogocho, but from the serenity of a village.

When clowns bury an ailing 92-year-old granny alive in a gunny sack in a shallow grave because no one wants to take the responsibility of caring for her, the news does not emerge from slums synonymous with social dysfunction, but from yet another sleepy village.

Guns have appeared in the village and violent crime is so common that only the most foolish dare stagger from the local chang’aa den to their homes after 9pm. In some places, child molestation and rape is so common that NGOs have sprung up to ‘fight’ the vice.

tasty delicacy

In Bungoma and Khayega, enterprising lads roast mutura, a tasty delicacy associated with low income city dwellers, a signal that the winds of change are blowing slums into the village. At Bulimbo Market in Mumias near my village, enterprising women roast French fries on open fires, heralding the rapid shift of eating habits from healthy cuisine to junk food.

Meanwhile, the rural middle class are gobbling up plots along rural roads and establishing nice, gated homes from which chubby children emerge and ride to private schools on motorcycle taxis.

But their former landlords, now landless and broke, shuffle blank-eyed across the market centre, stoned to death, more hopeless than the lot in slums. Grinding poverty, social breakdown, alcohol and drug abuse and violent crime have become the bane of the once sleepy village.

And when I hear idle village youth beg for “ten bob, 20 bob, or anything you have” for their next fix, it is, for me, the tick-tock-tick of a time bomb.

Trust me a slum kid these days has better chances of making it in life than his or her village counterpart.