Why Nubian community resists Kibera slum upgrade project

“It is a story characterised by the need to survive through challenges that are never explained to you. It is a story characterised by limited interactions with state officials who always remind you it is your privilege to be served by them. It is a story characterised by assuming false identities in order to belong,” he says.

Hussein is a programme officer in charge of the citizenship and stateless project at the Open Society Institute in Nairobi.

He admits that he had long accused most of his Nubian peers of being lazy.

However, after completing his university studies and consequently struggling to find formal employment for ten fruitless years, he came close to joining the ranks of the countless Nubians in Kenya who have given up all hope of securing productive careers because they had been denied national identity cards.

He has come to understand that Kenyan Nubians simply do not belong, he says.

“My great-grandfather worked in the service of the British in Somalia around the First World War and later resettled in Meru, in central Kenya. His father before him worked for the Turko-Egyptian army in the Sudan. I, like my parents, was born in western Kenya. However, our citizenship —like that of all Kenyan Nubians—has always been subject to vetting,” he explains.

On turning 18, every Kenyan is expected to apply for a national identity (ID) card which they are expected to carry on them at all times.

ID cards are a basic necessity in Kenya, required for such things as opening a bank account, applying for a job, signing a contract or obtaining a passport.

Acquiring a card should be fairly straightforward— applicants present their birth certificates along with copies of their parents ID cards.

But members of the Nubian community are routinely subjected to additional vetting of their applications, and constantly subject to the suspicion that they have sneaked into Kenya from Uganda and Sudan.

Nubians are often asked to bring in their grandparents’ documentation as well as a statement from their local council of elders to prove they are Kenyans.

Despite presenting all the documents required of them, many still do not obtain ID cards.

And without an ID card, a passport is out of the question.

Adam Hussein, of the citizenship and stateless project at the Open Society Institute in Nairobi, had to forgo excellent job opportunities overseas for this reason.

Kenyan Somalis face similar problems obtaining Kenyan ID cards.

But Nubians point out that they are not a border community, and while the government agrees there is no rationale for such vetting, the reality facing young Nubians applying for ID cards remains daunting.

Sheikh Ahmed Ramadhan is yet another young Nubi with a similar story.

The 30-year-old is coordinator of the Nubian Rights Forum, a human rights organisation working to promote the rights of the Nubian community in Kenya.

Ramadhan contends that the lack of recognition of Kenyan Nubians has persisted for too long and it is time for them to speak up and demand their rights.

“Our youth are put through rigorous vetting procedures when seeking identification documents despite the fact that they are Kenyans. And while we struggle to be acknowledged as citizens, the land that our forefathers were given in the early 1900s is slowly being snatched away from us. And with that aggression, our rich history and culture is being wiped out bit by bit,” he says.

Standing six-foot tall, when Ramadhan says his community will stand up for their rights and demand what is theirs, you are inclined to believe him.

“Kibera some of the land allocated to our forefathers to settle on, and here, five to six generations of Nubians reside in tight-knit family setups, in accordance with our culture. When there is war in Kibera and people die, while people from other ethnic groups are transported elsewhere, Nubians are buried in Kibera. We have our cemetery here. Our history in this country is deeply rooted here. This is our ancestral land,” Ramadhan says, his voice shaking.

This is why the slum upgrading project in Kibera is stirring up some strong emotions.

For some residents, the project is a source of hope on par with the great exodus of the Israelites to the land of Canaan.

For the Nubian community, the project has awakened feelings of statelessness and discrimination.

A collaboration between the Kenyan government and UN HABITAT, the slum upgrading project in Kibera —Kenya’s largest slum and Africa’s second largest informal settlement —is aimed at resettling the estimated one million people living in mud-walled shacks in modern high-rise apartments.

Not poor

The plan involves moving residents into alternative accommodation, and razing the vacated shacks to build new apartments in their place.

Once completed, those who were forced to move during the clearance will be allocated space in the new two-bedroomed apartments, for which they will pay rent to the government.

Each apartment is expected to house two families.

For the Nubian community, this project seems to have brought back memories of similar ventures which went awry in the past.

Instead of being among the beneficiaries, they were pushed to the sidelines while others took advantage.

“This is not the first slum-upgrading project in this country. Others have been tried in the past through the National Housing Corporation and the reality then was that the families that were supposed to benefit never got a chance to move into the modern houses,” says a sceptical Yusuf Diab, secretary general of the Nubian Council of Elders.

“The only successful project was that of Karanja Estate in 1962, where, upon completion, 80 per cent of those who got the houses were of the Nubian community. However, subsequent projects have ended up in the hands of outsiders and non-residents of Kibera.”

The Nubian community has resisted moving into the new apartments and instead vowed to stay put in the informal structures until government gives them adequate compensation as the community is the most well-established in Kibera, with many families renting out accommodation to other residents.

The Nubian community says they were never consulted regarding the planned upgrade.

Diab argues that the government and donors came into their community with a “know-it-all” attitude, assuming all residents of Kibera live on less than a dollar a day and will eternally depend on handouts.

“We may live in these informal structures but that does not mean we do not have finances. We as a community stick to our culture of generations living together in one house. But this does not mean we are poor. If you come into our homes we have all the facilities that affluent people have and despite the structures being informal, we have enough room to accommodate our large families,” he says.

He wonders how a household of up to five generations is expected to reside in one room sharing the toilet, bathroom and kitchen area with another family.

“This plan would turn us into government tenants for the rest of our lives. Here in Kibera we are landlords and apart from our houses, we own rooms that we rent out. How do you then expect us to sit back and allow someone to take away our source of livelihood and turn us from home-owners into tenants?” He asks.

According to Diab, the Nubian community would have preferred a plan that ensured they end up as homeowners.

An even better plan, he says, would have been to allocate land to the community and allow them to develop it themselves.

“Instead of the government building apartments for us, all we asked for was about 400 acres of Kibera land be allocated to the Nubian community. Then we would develop it at our own cost,” he says.

Hussein argues that the reason Nubians cannot own land and thus remain huddled in informal settlements such as Kibera as squatters on government land is because they remain effectively stateless.

“The issue here is, Nubians are considered foreigners and indeed, when proposals are advanced about allocating several acres to the community, politicians reiterate that no one will be allowed to own land in Kibera, and especially not a foreigner,” Hussein says.

As it is located only five kilometres from Nairobi’s central business district, Kibera is prime property.

Diab argues that most of the proposals and counterproposals regarding the fate and state of Kibera have arisen out of greed, with many eyeing an opportunity to pounce on and grab land in that area.

The entire project is expected to resettle all two million slum residents in the city over the course of nine years at a cost of 1.2 billion dollars.

While it enjoys the backing of the United Nations and Prime Minister Raila Odinga —the member of parliament who represents Kibera—whether it will be carried out successfully remains in question.

Delay

The project has come under fire from urban planners who say that it risks repeating the mistakes of previous schemes – where some of the low-income beneficiaries sublet their allocated flats to wealthier families and moved back to the slums themselves, or families shared their two-roomed apartments with one or even two other families in order to afford the rent.

The first batch of 1,500 people to leave the slum were moved to 300 new apartments in September.

They will pay approximately $10 a month in rent.

Most residents of Kibera earn less than $2 per day and pundits argue they may not be able to pay this rent as well as cover the additional charges for electricity and water.

The slow pace of the project has also stirred questions: if it continues at its current pace, it is feared that it will take 1,178 years to complete.

The potential for further delay is high.

The Nubian community is vowing not to back down, and Kibera landlords drawn from various other ethnic backgrounds have joined a legal challenge to the upgrade process through a suit filed at the Kenyan High Court.