Sungu Oyoo and Andrew Karamagi | May 2024

Background

Recent floods in Kenya, marked by the highest rainfall in decades, have left at least 270 people dead, over 200,000 displaced, and destroyed livelihoods and infrastructure worth billions of shillings. As affected communities were still grappling with the resultant displacement, loss and shock occasioned by these floods, bulldozers descended on several of their settlements in Nairobi to bring down housing structures built on areas the government describes as ‘riparian reserves’.

Already devastated by the floods and the attendant loss of lives, these communities were not in a position to effectively organise themselves or resist the evictions. They could only watch as settlements they had called home for decades crumbled under bulldozers protected by the purveyors of violence – the police.

Why callously demolish settlements in the midst of a great humanitarian disaster?

Shock therapy

The statement, “never let a good crisis go to waste” has been attributed to leading historical and current figures in politics, economics, the military, academia, and even used as a buzz phrase by motivational speakers. It is often quoted to uplift audiences, and to urge them to look at their challenges–however daunting–as opportunities to spring towards better fortune. It is meant to encourage, inspire, and to fire up the people.

Yet, when individuals like Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman said as much, they did not mean it in that sense. Far from it, they were making a case for applying ‘shock therapy’ to a population or society in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

The wicked rationale behind their position was that while the public is still stunned and dazed by a major disaster or crisis – be it an earthquake, market crash, pandemic, tsunami, or terrorist attack – it does not have the presence of mind to comprehend, much less resist fundamental policy, legislative, or administrative shifts. Much like how a street thug stuns their victim with a punch or a kick, or takes advantage of a misstep, or lapse in attention, then steals from them.

This is how, following the 9/11 attacks, the unbelievably draconian Patriot Act was passed in one of the so-called oldest democracies, the United States of America. The Patriot Act basically allowed the US government to monitor communications by tapping cell phones and emails without modifying or reducing the legal and constitutional restraints applicable to those modes of communication. Besides granting the American intelligence community unfettered access to personal information, this entrenched surveillance capitalism, which is the often illicit financialisation and monetisation of data captured from our online activities and the digital architecture around it. Prof. Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term surveillance capitalism, is on record saying that it not only undermines personal autonomy, but also erodes democracy.

It was under similar circumstances that entire fishing villages along the Indian Ocean coastline (in countries like India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives and Indonesia) were forcefully evicted in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami under the guise of safety measures, when in reality, industrial fishing companies, real estate corporations, and the leisure industry were grabbing their land and expanding operations.

Such was the chain of events in much of the industrialised West when the global economy suffered a meltdown in 2007, through to 2014: cuts to spending on essential services were enacted, state-owned entities were privatised, pension funds were raided, while innocent citizens lost jobs and houses. A similar programme by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has sparked widespread unrest and protests in Argentina early this year (2024). Banks, which in fact caused the global financial crisis through real-estate speculation and predatory lending, received outrageous ‘stimulus’ packages to keep them afloat. Readers will recall the popular outrage that spawned social movements like #OccupyWallStreet, even though they did not topple the systemic causes of the crisis.

A much more grievous and long-running kind of shock therapy was crafted and deployed by Dr Henry Kissinger, the infamous US Secretary of State, in Latin America and Indochina in the 1970s when dirty proxy wars were conducted against people and territories that had voted for, or expressed support for socialist politics or leaders, contrary to the interests of foreign multinational interests as in the case of the United Fruit Company in Colombia.

Closer to home, dreams of prosperity and wellbeing in most of the post-colonial states in Africa (including affordable social amenities, revival of agriculture, currency stability, and national economic sovereignty) were shattered by the IMF/World Bank’s unconscionable preconditions to budget support. These preconditions arose from Structural Adjustment Programmes that only helped to strangle and shatter the economies of these countries from the 1980’s, and even earlier.

More recently, a number of economies in southern Europe have similarly been devastated by the European Central Bank’s imposition of hurtful, harmful, and destructive austerity measures that favour the interests of multinational corporations and monopoly capital while decimating the livelihoods of the Portuguese, Italian, Irish, Greek, and Spanish people alike.

That twisted logic is the common thread that runs through the bloody mess that we have witnessed in Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan where civil strife, war, and general misfortune have been weaponised and commercialised under the pretext of ‘reconstruction’ and ‘relief efforts.’

This demented approach to public affairs has been labelled by Naomi Klein, a leading thinker on the subject, as “disaster capitalism”. Klein’s neologism denotes the exploitation of natural or manmade disasters (such as catastrophic weather events, war, epidemics, etc) in service of capitalist interests; the practice of using unstable social, political, and economic situations to impose or benefit from deregulation, and the privatisation of public assets.

It draws from a pervasive economic model and ideology known as neoliberalism, which entails the deregulation of capital markets, liberalisation of the economy, retreat of the state from provision of public services and privatisation of public enterprises in a manner that prioritises market fundamentalism as an approach to macroeconomic management.

Throughout this string of foregoing examples, gains and benefits are privatised by a minority, while losses are passed over to the majority tax-paying and often defenceless public.

Mathare: The Past is the Present

As coauthors, our word limit does not permit us space to delve into the laboratory that the Democratic Republic of the Congo, among several other African countries, have been reduced to by the barons of shock therapy over the decades… but suffice to say that a cursory glance at that country’s timeline will provide ample evidence of how disaster has been exploited for the benefit of narrow, transnational, racist, and military interests.

The lengthy backdrop we have laid should help us explain the connection between the ongoing disaster of flooding, the decision by the Kenyan government to conduct demolitions of ‘informal’ settlements in and around Nairobi, and how all this ties in with the notion of disaster capitalism.

It is a tale as old as time. The actors may be different, but the script has always been the same in Kenya, as everywhere else cited above.

First off, we contend that the sheer cruelty with which the authorities conducted the demolitions is not a mistake. It is not an aberration. There is a method to the madness.

Secondly, it is essential to underscore the central role that force plays in implementing shock therapy. This is because, as Gisele Halimi reminds us, “there is no humane way to rule people against their will.” It can therefore be said that disaster capitalism is incompatible with democracy. This fact explains the repressive trend of legislation being passed in acclaimed or supposedly free societies like the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, and our own Kenya.

Third, it is just as important to appreciate how disaster capitalism criminalises poverty, by designating human dwellings like slums (without inquiring into how people got there in the first place) as ‘condemned’, ‘informal’, ‘hideous’, ‘undesirable’, and so on. It is this third point that launches us into the substance of our argument.

Mathare, one of the oldest informalised settlements in Nairobi, is located in a valley that was once a quarry which supplied most of the material that was used to build Nairobi. It especially became populated when African labourers who had been forced out of white settler farms in the Rift Valley, moved to Nairobi and settled there. These disenfranchised and dislocated Africans would, in the following decades act as a bedrock of the struggle for national liberation, and have remained a bastion of resistance to oppression and tyranny in post-colonial Kenya.

Subsequent decades have witnessed the proliferation of slums and other forms of informalised settlements in urban Kenya because of a state of uneven development that has resulted in massive rural-urban migration as rural populations move in search of employment. This migration is compounded by the failure of the state to provide adequate social housing to the thousands of people who move to the cities every year.

Recent statistics show that more than 50% of Nairobians live in slums, the so-called informal settlements which occupy less than 6% of the land mass designated as Nairobi’s residential area. These are the conveniently forgotten masses, the millions of people who are unheard and unseen by the system. These urban settlements that they call home were among the areas worst affected by the recent floods. It is in these settlements that our people died like hapless chickens as a result of a situation that could have been avoided had the state heeded warnings of increased rainfall and impending floods which were issued by the meteorological department as early as late 2023.

Mathare Floods, Riparian Reserves, and the Housing Crisis (of Capitalism).

The recent disaster did not come as a surprise; it was allowed to happen. The Kenyan government took several days to respond to the crisis and to declare it a national disaster, and when it finally did, its genius ‘solution’ involved the demolition of settlements located in riparian reserves. These demolitions, however, only affected low-income settlements such as Mukuru, Mathare, Kiambiu, Majengo and Kibra while middle-class and high-end settlements built on similar riparian reserves in other parts of Nairobi are sitting pretty, and remain untouched to date.

These demolitions were carried out in the most inhumane manner, when communities were still reeling from the loss of lives, property and shock occasioned by the deluge. They are reminiscent of the similarly brutal Kariobangi demolitions and evictions of 2020, which were orchestrated on a cold and rainy Nairobi night, and in the midst of a raging Covid-19 pandemic that adversely affected families and communities. True to form, many other demolitions in Kenya have previously been carried out at night or dawn, traumatising communities that are already under distress, and effectively rendering them incapable of responding to the brutal assaults on their settlements.

Remember the street thug in our introduction who pounces on their victim without warning?

The net effect of the recent demolitions in Nairobi is that those communities most affected by the floods are today not talking about the floods and how they have been affected out of both shock and fear that such discussions might give the government reason to carry out more demolitions.

These communities have been demolished and intimidated into silence – both literally and figuratively. They suffer in silence.

The only noise from where their places of abode once stood is the busy construction sites that jut through the Nairobi skyline in the form of real estate and prime property developments, including industrial plants. The pressure that they exert on the already overwhelmed drainage system is itself another cause of the flooding, but the poor must pay for the ineptitude of the public institutions that allowed the construction to go ahead.

Notably, the conspicuous absence of the authorities from public discourse – let alone any indication of interest in mounting an effective disaster response – stands in stark contrast to the force that the Kenyan government has used against communities and activists who have peacefully protested the evictions and expressed their reservations about the same. When the people of Mathare organised a peaceful protest in the aftermath of the demolition of their houses, the police arrested them, then raided community spaces such as Mathare Social Justice Centre(MSJC) where even more community organisers were arrested. When the dust and teargas finally settled, the affected communities had to again deal with multiple deaths caused by bulldozers and falling debris.

Conclusion

This posture is consistent with the notion which urges governments to “do nothing” and leave such disasters to market forces – or perhaps divine intervention – to correct systemic economic problems, but be ready to crack down on dissent with excessive force. We take exception to such defeatist approaches to public policy, and conclude by inviting readers to consider the following viewpoint:

The Government of Kenya, as elsewhere, owes its citizens, who double as taxpayers and voters, a duty of care. Article 43 of the Constitution of Kenya(2010) guarantees the right to accessible and adequate housing, and to reasonable standards of sanitation. This means and includes social housing, constructing or expanding storm drains, funding and facilitating environmental protection agencies, cracking the whip on those whose duty it is to ensure that disasters such as floods do not happen, or if they happen, are mitigated.

Instead of heeding this constitutional command, the Kenyan government is today masquerading as a construction firm involved in putting up ‘affordable housing units’, which are in some instances, sold at rates higher than standard market rates. Most Kenyans cannot afford these ‘affordable housing’ units, they need social housing. The drafters of the Constitution were not passing time when they entrenched this right in such clear and unambiguous language. The various settlements in Nairobi, which host more than half of Nairobi’s population, only exist because the State has, over the years, failed to provide adequate social housing to the people. It is doubly injurious when evictions are conducted without prior and adequate notice and compensation.

The Social Contract that exists between the people and the state must mean something tangible. It is a serious case of abdication for public authorities to approve building plans or look on as property developments go up on floodplains, or designated ecological reserves, then come back to demolish settlements built through the sheer hard work and sacrifice of the masses. At any rate, recent demolitions have been carried out in a manner that makes it look like only poor people’s settlements encroach on riparian reserves.

All Kenyans are born equal in dignity and rights. The criminalisation of poverty and the derogation of the dignity of the poor at the altars of financial and political expediency do not augur well for a society whose forebears waged an epic, successful war against colonial subjugation – only to be vanquished and dispossessed by their own.