‘Maendeleo ni watu, si vitu(Development should focus on people, not things)’ – Julius Nyerere

The tailor who operates a small tailoring shop a few metres from my house, likely in his late forties, once narrated to me how he learnt and polished his craft in prison. He is often busy patching old clothes for clients, most of whom are laboring African sisters and brothers who cannot afford the luxury of buying new clothes every now and then.

But this, my dear reader, is not a narrative of how prisons rehabilitate offenders. That is a deception which we will debunk another day and expose how they instead act as reservoirs for the poor majority. This is additionally not a story about how his customers, most of whom work in an Export Processing Zone nearby, are exploited, everyday producing clothes they can not afford. Not at all!

Something stands out about this tailor. He was once a homeless man who was forced by his realities to engage in crime in order to survive, and who eventually ended up in prison. While in prison, he got the opportunity to realise his lifelong dreams of gaining technical skills in tailoring and carpentry in addition to learning how to read and write. These skills, which were impossible for him to acquire as a homeless, poverty-stricken ‘freeman’, enabled him to regain the hope of one day being able to rent a house and start a family. He told me that surviving in confinement was a thousand times better than living as a lonely, hopeless, and homeless man on the streets – often going hungry on most days. He described the cruel streets as torture chambers in an open air prison where the dreams and lives of many are stifled, shattered and killed. But again, this is not the life story of this tailor, but a tale of the dark clouds of the crisis of social housing that has descended on us.

I’m sweating profusely in the evening cold as I write this piece. Perhaps it stems from the intense heat of injustice around me. I’m seated about five hundred metres from the place where Muthoni Nyanjiru and other patriots were brutally murdered by police and settler bullets when they demanded the release of Harry Thuku in 1922. Thuku was a founder of the East African Association (EAA) which campaigned against the kipande system of pass controls, forced labour of women and girls, reduced wages and increase in poll and hut tax imposed on African people by the colonial state.

I’m specifically writing from Jevanjee Gardens in Nairobi’s city centre. Men and women assemble at the heart of this historic park to engage in social, economic, and political debates at the People’s Parliament, popularly referred to as Bunge La Mwananchi in Swahili.

Surviving on the Fringes.

In as much as it is common to see large audiences listening intently and reacting to arguments and debates here, it would be inaccurate to think that all who assemble here are very concerned about the country’s political realities. It is circumstances that push most of them to find their way to this park.

Some are here after enduring harsh weather all day while unsuccessfully looking for work. These unemployed people and others returning from the affluent neighbourhoods of Upper Hill and Westlands, where they slave and earn just enough to avoid starvation, gather here in the evenings to trick their hunger with a cup of porridge and mandazi that cost thirty shillings, then pass time as they wait for bus fares to drop so that they can join their beloved families.

Most of the members of this People’s Parliament are among the millions that relocated to the city in pursuit of better opportunities because of unequal development. Majority live in tin-walled shacks, others are accommodated by relatives, while the most unfortunate ones sleep on the streets.

Today being the end of the month, it is common for people to stay at this gathering until late at night in a bid to avoid their landlords and the cruel real estate agents. Several ‘ honourable members’ of the people’s parliament also spend their nights at this park. As dusk falls and members begin to leave one by one, you’ll notice some of these destitute Africans retrieving sacks and blankets from their backpacks and preparing for yet another frustrating and lonely night of deferred dreams within this park. The political talks and exchanges are their only source of entertainment before calming themselves to a slumber under the whistling cold.

For a few of the educated yet poverty-stricken members, this parliament provides them an opportunity to show off their mastery of the Queen’s language and thus command some level of respect from their peers. That is the only ‘dignity’ their education can afford them.

However, today’s gathering is unlike any other. It is completely packed, and you can see glaring sadness, frustration and anger on everyone’s face. The focus of today’s debate is the government’s affordable housing initiative. Even the gospel ministers who preach at the park, those ministers who are perpetually preaching about the vanity of earthly possessions and about a permanent home in heaven, have halted their sermons to listen and add to this conversation so as to bring to life the slim probability of them securing a permanent home on earth.

On my way to this park, I passed by Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi’s statue in the city centre. A homeless man lay deeply asleep beneath the statue. He seemed more at peace than most of us who constantly face the threat of homelessness and who are always one paycheck away from abject poverty.

The sight at that statue broke my heart. It reminded me that we live in a social, political, and economic system that intentionally drives homeless people to live on sidewalks so as to serve a warning to anyone who has a job – regardless of how exploited they are. A warning that you are only one or two paychecks away from living on the streets.

Our great leader Dedan Kimathi and other freedom fighters paid the ultimate price during the struggle for national liberation. They gave their lives to put an end to the dispossession and indignity inflicted on their fellow Africans by the British settler colonial authority that had reduced the majority of them to squatters on their land. But the inhumanity of landlessness and homelessness has persisted under successive administrations.

Toward the end of 2023, as those in charge of our social welfare curled under warm duvets and turned on heaters in their palatial homes to beat the cold, community workers were collecting the bodies of homeless persons who had frozen to death in their sleep. On the 22nd of November,  Zero Street Child, a Community-Based Organization (CBO) in Nairobi’s Mathare slums, posted on their social media platforms that they had collected the bodies of four young men who had died of hypothermia. They succumbed to the chill of the night, their bodies cold and stiff.

In one of the dailies, I recently read the story of a man who works during the day and bribes night guards to sleep inside long-distance buses at Machakos Country bus station. His meagre earnings are only enough to support his humble family in the village and cater for his bright daughter’s education at a public high school.

In a country where the majority live below a hundred shillings a day, often going hungry and dying from treatable diseases in their dingy dwellings in the sprawling slums – the government is trying to make us believe that the only way to dignify the lives of this majority is to construct ‘affordable’ houses that are sold or rented above their financial standing. Meanwhile, it concurrently demolishes the homes of these wretched Africans in the name of development and urban regeneration.

In Mukuru Kwa Njenga, the state sanctioned the demolition of homes belonging to these hardworking people in December 2021.One morning, the people of Mukuru suddenly found themselves turned into Internally Displaced People (IDPs) surviving in tents after tractors descended on their houses, resulting in loss of lives and destruction of their properties. Majority of those affected were already exploited in the factories of Nairobi’s industrial area where they do back-breaking labour on a daily basis.

A few months before the demolitions, a section of slum dwellers from Mukuru had filed a case at the Environment and Lands Court seeking to block Orbit Chemical Industries Ltd from evicting them from this place they had called home since 1958. But (In)Justice Edward Wabwoto dismissed their case, paving the way for their eviction and enabling part of their properties to be auctioned by the private company.

A year earlier, in 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, houses in Kariobangi were demolished late at night as it poured heavily. It was a painful sight to see – especially the old and mothers trying to salvage the remains of their households with shivering young children in tow.

Before that, thousands of people in Kenya‘s largest slum, Kibra, watched helplessly in 2018 as government cranes and bulldozers demolished not only their homes but also two primary schools and a children’s home to make way for a new $20m dual-carriageway meant to relieve traffic congestion in the capital, Nairobi.

Countless cases of similar nature abound across Nairobi, Africa, and everywhere the dispossessed find themselves across the world. This is a war without terms against the poor, the impoverished, the dispossessed.

The Deception of Social Housing

In all the cases highlighted above, politicians and Non-Governmental Organisations(NGO’s) appeared with donations of tents, mattresses, blankets, and foodstuffs to deceive the masses into thinking that they were sympathetic. The politicians were keen to earn political points, as the mainstream NGOs performed their traditional role of depoliticizing these masses.

But these heart-breaking tales of those who are chewed up and spat out by the system never seem to stop! In the Park Road area, it is ‘normal’ to see mothers braving the cold with their babies on empty stomachs just a few metres from the ‘affordable’ government houses. Imagine a homeless mother who has been battered and dehumanised by the system but who keeps trying to survive and provide for her child despite knowing that her baby has little to no chance of living a dignified life in the future, or even surviving to adulthood to care for her during her sunset years – that is if she is lucky enough to get there.

The government believes that the proper response to the burgeoning number of homeless people sleeping on the city streets is to unleash police and county askaris who raid, brutalise and arrest them so as to push them out. The county leadership in Nairobi says it wants to make the city great again and more attractive for investors! This system continually and consistently criminalises the very existence of homelessness such that if you can’t hawk your labour to survive within it, you’re sent to prison to replenish the workforce with slave labour. Beyond the criminalisation of homelessness, this system completely acts blind to the root causes of homelessness.

On this day, I must address the honourable members of the People’s Parliament. I want to inform them that the government’s strategy to solve this crisis is against the poor people. I want to explain and clarify to them thoroughly that this government is mainly concerned with the housing question because the building of homes is a very profitable industry.

They must be aware that successive regimes build homes for workers only by way of exception. They must recognise that the main concern of the government in this regard is to first satisfy the demand for houses by the middle class who are equally afflicted by the housing crisis and who can afford to buy them. This is why the poor are priced out of owning these housing units. I want these people to understand that the government is merely advocating for a cosmetic solution to this crisis so that the solution continually proposes the same question, thereby allowing the political elite to utilise it as a mobilisation tool.

I will fight if necessary to address this gathering today! I want them to understand that in our society, those considered as smart landlords are those who can ruthlessly maximise earnings from their properties.

Since most of those gathered here are impoverished people who have lived through successive World Bank and IMF instigated Structural Adjustment Programs over the decades, they’ve seen the irrigation schemes collapse and farmers impoverished. They’ve seen the coffee, sugarcane, tea and milk cooperatives their parents depended on crash and their lives turned upside down, a factor that forced most of them to find their way into the city. They’ve also either sold or witnessed their parents sell their ancestral lands and become squatters – or relocate to the village shopping centres – in order to pay for privatised healthcare and education. They will therefore understand when I tell them that, aside from one grass-to-grace tale, the overwhelming majority of them – despised, forgotten, and unheard – will most likely grow to old age and die without ever affording a decent shelter or life.

Even if it were possible, the state would not want to eradicate the problem of housing. Friedrich Engels reminds us that;

“It is perfectly clear that the existing state is neither able nor willing to do anything to remedy the housing difficulty. The state is nothing but the organised collective power of the possessing classes, the landowners and the capitalists as against the exploited classes, the peasants and the workers. What the individual capitalists (and it is here only a question of these because in this matter the landowner who is also concerned acts primarily as a capitalist) do not want, their state also does not want.”

In one of our recent community meetings in Kasarani with a women’s group, they brought to the fore an unholy alliance between the landlords, auctioneers, and the local administration.

The women claimed that when a tenant misses just one month’s rent, auctioneers arrive early, just as children are leaving for school. They order them to leave with nothing then proceed to lock the house. Everything is later auctioned off for almost nothing. The chiefs (local administrative system) who are part of this immoral scheme frustrate their efforts to get justice. All of this is done without receiving the legally-required notice to vacate in accordance with section 57 of the Land Act(2012) – leaving these disadvantaged families agonising over their next move.

If my fellow honourable members miss all that, let them at least get it clear that the crisis of social housing cannot be solved without solving the social question. It is not enough to just house people; they must be part of a functional system. This is only conceivable if they have state power in the hands of a pro-poor government that will struggle to build socialism to provide adequate housing, water, sanitation, education health care and a clean environment for all.

Kinuthia Ndung’u is an organiser with the Communist Party of Kenya and Kasarani Social Justice Centre.