Slums migrating, take over villages

By Edward Indakwa

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 ‘slum’ dwellings.

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-eyed foreigners, lopped over endless dung-filled trenches daily, fighting to swat away the cancer of rot before it swallows up entire cities.

As we speak, there is a big plan to flatten them 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.

Grinding poverty

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 free range 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.

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.

Who said our MPs don’t have rights?

I didn’t lose much sleep cursing MPs for sneaking that bonus payment, what a cheeky Kiswahili newscaster called kiinua mgongo – a bribe – into some Finance Bill.

I was pretty sure that President Kibaki, who is generally tight-fisted, wasn’t going to slap Sh2 billion on MPs that I suspect he privately holds in kumbafu contempt.

Barring that, I was also quite sure that a noisy activist would file a court suit challenging the payment. And with the Judiciary barking like a rabid dog since that man with an ear stud took over, I had no doubt that MPs were never going to drink those millions.

Unlike you, though, I feel a little sorry for them. The darn thing was in the bag and then ‘zap!’ it was gone. They must feel like the crocodile that lay lazily by the sandy banks of a river, mouth agape, playing dead so that flies could perch on its smelly teeth for the odd, rotting morsel. And just when the flies, Sh9 million worth of them, had formed a tasty swarm, the croc slammed its mouth shut only to find that President Kibaki had evacuated the dinner to safety. Damn that soon-to-be retiree!

Anyone who watched nominated MP Rachael Shebesh perform in Parliament, her huge mass of ‘human’ hair shaking tremulously like an enraged bull, must have felt MPs pain. “We have our rights too!” she thundered. Oh yes, tell them Shebesh. You have rights to a pampered lifestyle. Unfortunately, Kenyans don’t, so they hardly share in your tribulations.

Thing is if MPs hate their jobs, if the pay sucks, they could always seek alternative employment. Unfortunately, only a handful merit Sh200,000-a-month jobs, as they will discover when villagers boot them out in March 2013.