Pain of seeing bulldozers crush dream home

By Machua Koinange

Nairobi, Kenya: The strip between Kibera slums and Lang’ata Road, off the Southern Bypass has been reduced to something like a war zone.

Demolished buildings. Rubble. Plumes of dust. Heavily armed police officers with tear gas holding back a crowd of onlookers who look more like aspiring looters than emotional sympathisers.

A section of a multi-storey building collapse under a curtain of dust, prodded on by a excavator shaped out like a large insect with an oversized needle hanging from its nose.

“My entire life savings are gone right here,” says Kefa Keng’ara, 52.

He drove 144km from Narok after getting a frantic phone call from a concerned friend last Saturday. His house was being demolished by an armada of bulldozers and excavators supported by an army of hired destroyers. “By the time I got here, my bungalow was gone.”

Keng’ara is crestfallen.

He says he bought the 15m by 43m plot in 2003 and received the title deed of the previously owner. He did not complete the transfer, assuming that the property was his anyway.

Keng’ara spent close to Sh6 million to purchase the property and put up a three-bedroomed bungalow.

Took a loan

Life was good and Keng’ara was living the Kenyan dream. The house was a break away from the dusty Narok plains where he worked as a civil servant and was comforted knowing he had a home in Nairobi. His investment was supported by a loan. He is liable for the loan despite his dream crashing down last Saturday.

Residents from Kibera hang around the scene, waiting to help themselves to some of the salvage and make some quick cash. Two others, home owners whose properties had been demolished declined to speak.

At the property neighbouring Keng’ara, the owner, a woman and her daughter stood pensive watching an excavator takes painful digs at her former three-storey rental complex. “ I don’t want to talk please. This is just too painful to talk about.”

The Lang’ata Road demolition and memories of Syokimau are emblematic of Kenya’s real estate nightmare: purchasing a property complete with a title, spending millions to put up your dream home and then watch it come down under a hail of dust.

Compensation

“I really blame our Government. They can’t protect us, they give us a title deed and then come and destroy our houses.” Moans Keng’ara. “They should compensate us for this. I am so bitter and angry that I don’t feel like a Kenyan anymore.”

But the pain of losing your home comes with a price. It is expensive and agonising in many ways. For a start, Keng’ara had to watch the last remnants of his house coming down once he arrived in Nairobi on Sunday.

“Then I had to fight off looters who descended on the site immediately the bulldozers were done,” Keng’ara says. He has spent the last three nights at the site with only a mattress and a pile of blankets to protect rescued house property and materials from the demolished structure.

Keng’ara is transformed and emphatic: “It can get cold here at night, but what I do? I will never buy land in Nairobi again. Look at me? I am old now, it’s like starting my life all over again with nothing at my age. How do I start all over?”