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Kenya: Infomal Sector Dwellers Find Living Elsewhere a Challenge
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The Nation (Nairobi)
1 May 2008
Posted to the web 30 April 2008
Silas Nthiga
Nairobi
A multi-million-shilling project meant to eradicate slums and provide decent housing to squatters and low income earners in Embu Town is being frustrated by the prospective beneficiaries themselves.
Most of them have rejected the decent low cost houses and have opted to remain in the slums to cash in on the lawlessness in the informal settlements.
In some instances, beneficiaries of the free houses have rented them out to middle income earners and returned to the slums where lawlessness is the norm.
The few living in the houses have invited their relatives and friends to stay in their former shacks, making nonsense of the very purpose of the project - to eradicate informal settlement. This has also adversely affected the council's efforts to check rural-urban migration.
Joint programme
The project, funded by the council and NGOs, targeted more than 1,000 families in Shauri Yako slums and another 500 families squatting at Kathita slums.
In the first phase, the council had identified 150 families from Shauri Yako and a similar number from Kathita and had undertaken to relocate them to low cost, but decent houses, at Majimbo and Rupingazi River bank respectively.
The project was to be implemented in a joint programme in which the beneficiaries were to provide labour, while the council and the donors provided land and finance respectively.
Each prospective beneficiary was to get a two-bedroom self-contained house.
The noble project has turned out to be a nightmare as the number of slum dwellers continues to swell, some of them putting up structures on commercial plots in the central business district.
This has hindered real estate development in the town and denied the council the much needed revenue after land owners displaced by the squatters refuse to pay land rates.
The mushrooming slums have also worsened the security situation in the town with criminals finding a safe haven for their activities.
Back on track
The council is back on the drawing boar working out the strategies of ensuring that the project achieves its original objective.
Mayor Peter Murithi has vowed to ensure that the project, started 10 years ago, met its objective "no matter what it takes".
Mr Murithi recently announced a raft of radical measures the council intends to undertake to ensure that the project was back on track.
The mayor said the council was in the process of reviewing the project with a view to ensuring that it benefited genuine slum dwellers.
The process will involve re-identifying genuine beneficiaries and establishing those who either refused to move into the new houses, and those who rented them out.
Those found to have done so will have their houses repossessed and allocated to the deserving cases.
In addition, the mayor said the council would demolish shacks formerly occupied by the beneficiaries to discourage their being left to other people.
The council also intends to get the owners of plots occupied by the squatters to develop them. This, he said, would earn the council revenue through land rates.
"The council will act tough and is not ready to compromise on this issue. The project must and I'm insisting must achieve its objective," Mr Murithi said.
The mayor admitted that the project had achieved the very opposite of what it was meant to achieve.
"It is true that instead of eradicating slums, this project ended up increasing the number of slum dwellers and we are re-addressing the whole issue with a view to avoiding a repeat" he said.
The civic leader talked of ongoing negotiations between the local authority and various donors to ensure that more slum dwellers were provided with decent housing.
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He said the council had entered into negotiations with United Nations Habitat with a view to providing modern housing to families in Dallas estate.
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