Politics and Slum Upgrading in Kenya: A Case Study on the Influence of Politics on Slum Upgrading in Kibera

216 Pages·2014·5.233 MB·English

by  George M. Kiyu

Berliner Studien zur Politik in Afrika 18 18 Berliner Studien zur Politik in Afrika 18
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George M. Kiyu
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Politics and Slum Upgrading in Kenya e
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Why was the slum upgrading project in corruption, tribalism, political interpreta- i
Kibera, Kenya, facing resistance? This tion of the project aims, bureaucracy, slum g
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study uses both qualitative and quantita- oriented businesses (kadogo economy) as i A Case Study on the Influence of Politics
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tive methods in data collection to reveal well as NGO activity and youth unemploy-
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that politics revolving around the interests ment. r on Slum Upgrading in Kibera
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business operators as well as external U
players such as NGOs hamper successful The Author m
implementation of the slum upgrading George M. Kiyu is a political science
project Kenya Slum Upgrading Program in expert. His research focuses on urban u
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Kibera. The key obstacles include poverty, management. S
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ISBN 978-3-631-64952-7
Berliner Studien zur Politik in Afrika 18 18 Berliner Studien zur Politik in Afrika 18
u
y
i
K
M.
e
g
r George M. Kiyu
o
e
G
a Politics and Slum
George M. Kiyu
y
n
Politics and Slum Upgrading in Kenya e
K Upgrading in Kenya
n
Why was the slum upgrading project in corruption, tribalism, political interpreta- i
Kibera, Kenya, facing resistance? This tion of the project aims, bureaucracy, slum g
n
study uses both qualitative and quantita- oriented businesses (kadogo economy) as i A Case Study on the Influence of Politics
d
tive methods in data collection to reveal well as NGO activity and youth unemploy-
a
that politics revolving around the interests ment. r on Slum Upgrading in Kibera
of local politicians, slum dwellers and g
p
business operators as well as external U
players such as NGOs hamper successful The Author m
implementation of the slum upgrading George M. Kiyu is a political science
project Kenya Slum Upgrading Program in expert. His research focuses on urban u
l
Kibera. The key obstacles include poverty, management. S
d
n
a
s
c
i
t
i
l
o
P
Politics and Slum Upgrading in Kenya
BERLINER STUDIEN ZUR POLITIK IN AFRIKA

Herausgeben von Prof. Dr. Franz Ansprenger und Dr. Salua Nour

Bd./Vol. 18
George M. Kiyu

Politics and Slum Upgrading
in Kenya
A Case Study on the Influence of Politics
on Slum Upgrading in Kibera
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na-
tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the
internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover image: © George M. Kiyu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kiyu, George M., 1972- author.
Politics and slum upgrading in Kenya : a case study on the influence of
politics on slum upgrading in Kibera / George M. Kiyu.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-3-631-64952-7
1. Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme. 2. Slums–Kenya–Kibera–Case
studies.
3. Slums–Political aspects–Kenya–Kibera. 4. Urban poor–Housing–Kenya–
Kibera. 5. Housing policy–Kenya–Kibera–Case studies. 6. Kibera (Kenya–
Economic conditions. I. Title.
HV4160.5.A5K59 2014
307.33640967625--dc23
2014011640

ISSN 0930-7303
ISBN 978-3-631-64952-7 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-653-04073-9 (E-Book)
DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-04073-9

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Frankfurt am Main 2014
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Editors’ Preface
The series Berlin Studies on African Politics include occasional publications of out-
standing research work done mostly at the Free University of Berlin and once in a
while at other German academic institutions about Sub-Saharan-African politics.
The published monographs cover such areas as: New Approaches to the Analysis of Po-
litical Orders, Social and Economic Structures and Relations on the National, Sub- and
Supranational Levels; Implementation and Critique of Governance Concepts and of De-
velopment Paradigms; the Impact of Globalization on National Economies and Culture;
Conflict, Security and Peacebuilding; African Social History and Post-Colonial Studies.
The multi-focal approach to dealing with Sub-Saharan African politics has been
chosen simultaneously with methodological pluralism as the scientific foundation
of the series in accordance with the main goal in the pursuit of which it has been
created. This goal being the extension of the knowledge bases to which social sci-
ence thinking about and in Sub-Saharan Africa refers, this foundation has been
constructed with two key objectives in mind: a) to create a forum in which research-
ers from the North and the South look at this region from diverging points of view,
controversial debates about African challenges, risks und seemingly unsolvable 21st
century problems being the best way to discovering the many aspects of the complex
African reality and potentialities which cannot be discerned by means of monistic
and reductionist approaches, and b) to overcome the undeniably given fragmenta-
tion of African Studies by giving those a common ground on which this region is seen
in a holistic way, as opposed to only focusing on its challenges and disabilities, with
view of requiring science to deliver more significant contributions to the solution of
African problems than it has done before.
The series Berlin Studies on African Politics thus offers researchers about African
matters to publish their findings and insights from different areas of specialization
across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. It includes, therefore, studies
conducted from a Structuralist as well as a Post-Structuralist, a conventional Realist
as well as an Institutionalist or Constructivist Perspective. If a bias is detected, all the
same, in the selection of studies to be published in this series, then it is a bias in favor
of studies which add knowledge about Sub-Saharan Africa which is gained from a
critical perspective by means of which the observed and reported insufficiencies of
knowledge acquired through Mainstream research can best be remedied. It is most
certainly also a bias in favor of studies in which scientifically validated insights go
hand in hand with a high degree of relevance for African praxis.
The present study is an important contribution to the achievement of the series
goals because it provides knowledge of relevant theories and the critique of those in
the research field where the object under investigation is located as well as scientifi-
cally founded insights into the real dynamics and interaction of the two biggest chal-
lenges which Sub-Saharan African countries are presently facing, namely: poverty,
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manifesting itself in the phenomenon of extending urban slums, and the corruption
of the political power elite, which constitutes the main cause for the failure of most
slum-upgrading schemes. A great merit of the study lies in the fact that it is not lim-
ited to uncovering the dynamics which produce and perpetuate the analyzed prob-
lems but that it also offers logical and practically feasible options for their solution.
The study represents an input into the ongoing scientific conversation about ur-
banization in Sub-Saharan Africa as a social process shaped by economic necessities
and challenges as well as by political agency and also shaping those. Increasingly,
urbanization in the Global South and especially in this region is identified, in pub-
lic awareness and within different branches of environmental and political science
studies, with slum building and failing schemes of slum upgrading. In view of the
urbanization growth rates, calculated in the sixties and seventies of the last century,
the urban population in this region was expected, due to the scarcity of statistical
data in that period, to amount to an average of over 50 % of the total population
of those countries in 2020. Added to this alarming growth rate, the fact that the
slum containing and upgrading schemes, developed in those years to deal with the
slum problem in African urban areas, did not fulfill their intended purpose indeed
brought the slum expansion problem into the center of interest of environment and
political science research as one of the most explosive social problems which Sub-
Saharan African countries have to face.
Although it has been established later that urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa are
growing at a slower rate than was expected, the slum expansion problem remained
a distressing phenomenon in terms of the absolute numbers of persons living in re-
form-resistant slums and bearing the costs in human life, life quality degradation and
environmental irreversible destruction resulting from the frequent failure of slum
upgrading schemes. With this study, the author takes up the challenge of identifying
the economic, social and political mechanisms which cause this failure and he holds
out the prospect of defining, on the basis of his research results, procedures by which
slum upgrading problems could be dealt with successfully. He has proved his com-
petence for dealing with this issue by the comprehensive and systematic rendition of
the relevant scientific literature dealing with the subject of slum building and slum
upgrading in the Global South and especially in Sub-Saharan African countries and
also by devising a complex research program, which integrates the inquiry methods
of environmental studies as well as political science, and by executing this program
in an exemplary way.
The author derives his central hypothesis about the reason for the failure of slum
upgrading schemes from his vast knowledge of mainstream and critical studies in
this research field. The hypothesis, that politics and complex administrative struc-
tures hamper the implementation of the Kenya Slum Upgrading Program, KENSUP,
in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, is submitted to a well structured and conclusively sub-
stantiated empirical analysis which provides deep insights into the political, social
and economic dynamics prevailing in that slum area.
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According to his argumentation, slum building is to be considered as part and par-
cel of the poverty problem in Sub-Saharan African countries. Consequently, the inca-
pacity to stem its expansion should be ascribed to the same reasons which cause the
failure of approaches and concepts of poverty reduction. The author makes a case for
explaining poverty problems by the functioning of the increasingly globalized eco-
nomic and political international system which - inevitably and due to its underlying
rationale – produces inequalities between those players who are integrated into the
markets and the vast majority of those who are not. The liberalized playfield is thus
dominated worldwide by powerful global players and their allies on the national level.
Logically, these forces can advance their financial and political interests (including the
determination of economic policies, the maintenance of the political status quo, the
reduction of social expenditures and the resistance to reforms aiming at wealth redis-
tribution) at the expense of the marginalized majority which is excluded from the mar-
kets as well as too fragmented and, therefore, unable to carve out any advantages from
the existing system. These players are left to deal with the problems resulting from the
scarcity of resources and the insufficiencies of the resource reproduction mechanisms
in the respective given system and leading to the intensification of the violent forms
of survival fight and of corruption as well as to the spread of the informal economy.
In the same way in which poverty reduction strategies proved to be mostly inef-
fective in Sub-Saharan African countries because of being top-down strategies which
did not target the main mechanisms reproducing poverty (namely, the weakness
of the production structure in these countries which fails to meet the growth and
diversification requirements imposed by a growing unemployed population; the
dominance of powerful foreign players and local elites who impose the rules of the
game and the incapacity of the fragmented majority to defend its interests), slum
upgrading schemes fail, from the author’s point of view, in resolving slum upgrading
problems, the slum being a microcosm the functioning of which is based on the same
logic which underlies the functioning of the national system.
In this microcosm the Government, the politicians, the community leaders, the
donor organizations, the business community and the NGOs are the powerful stake-
holders whom the slum inhabitants have to deal with in the context of slum up-
grading issues. Every stakeholder advances his interests according to his capacities
and his rooms for manoeuvre. Assuming that the outcome of this interaction, which
favors the powerful players and leaves the insufficiently informed, fragmented and
needy slum inhabitants to be manipulated by the powerful players and in a state of
incapacity to form a force to defend their interests and counterbalance those play-
ers, is the main impediment to the implementation of KENSUP, the author focuses
the study on the analysis of these stakeholders, their conflicting interests, beliefs,
attitudes and action patterns and on the identification of the relation between those
and the lacking progress in the implementation of this program. He has succeeded
in showing, the analysis of the Kibera slum case and the impeded implementation
of the KENSUP in its context, that the hypothesis concerning the existence and the
3
way of functioning of the mechanisms interfering with the realization of KENSUP is
supported by the facts.
The study features the merit of dealing with a relevant research topic in the fields
of environmental and political studies and of having been conducted by means of a
competently handled combination of quantitative and qualitative tools. It goes well
beyond the conventional technical environmental studies of the slum upgrading
problems, by uncovering the political, social and economic mechanisms which drive
the process of slum expansion and impede the implementation of slum upgrading
strategies. It also goes beyond political studies concerning slum building as a mani-
festation of poverty to be dealt with on the basis of poverty reduction strategies, by
explaining the dynamics of slum building and the failure of slum upgrading schemes
from a technical point of view.
In addition, the study has the merit of drawing the attention of researchers in the
fields of environment and political studies to the fact that poverty reduction and
slum upgrading schemes are prone to fail if they are either predominantly state or
private sector centered while excluding the active (and not only symbolic or formal)
participation of the target groups concerned by those schemes, under the impact of
the law of increasing problems and diminishing available resources for their solution as
well as of the law of cumulative inequality increases. The study has, thus, an emanci-
patory function because it raises the awareness of the self-accelerating disadvantages
inflicted on the slum inhabitants, who should be considered as the main stakeholders
in the context of conceiving and implementing poverty reduction and slum upgrad-
ing strategies, and it points toward possibilities of overcoming those disadvantages.
Another merit of the study is to be seen in the fact that it documents the cour-
age of its author who, in spite of serving in the public sector of his country, adopts a
critical approach and speaks his mind with regard to the inadequacies of the political
system and the public administration in dealing with the country’s social and eco-
nomic challenges, when he might have had a simpler task to fulfill if he would have
based his study on mainstream approaches and avoided giving the impression of
being a whistle-blower with reference to the objectionable politics of the power elite
in his country. The study shows that it is definitely possible to be serving a govern-
ment and yet to address to it a constructive critique of its doings when the critique is
underpinned by scientifically proved insights.
This rich, insightful and praxis-relevant study is recommended as an essential
reading for Kenyan and foreign students, researchers, development experts and de-
cision-makers specializing in or concerned by political and environmental issues in
Sub-Saharan Africa since it constitutes an appreciable extension of the knowledge
base of this area of studies and is thus a contribution to the enhancement of the util-
ity of scientific research as an instrument for producing effective solutions for Sub-
Saharan African problems.
Prof. Dr. Franz Ansprenger Dr. Salua Nour
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