Kibera: The Lie of the Biggest Slum in Africa
Kibera is famous and it's fame keeps spreading. Kibera is more than the largest slum in Africa, as has been believed by many for long. It is also a tourist attraction. Any visitor to Kenya with a heart for improving the well fare of the wretched of Africa, get his signature of philanthropy by going to Kibera.
BBC, Al Jazeera, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Gordon Brown, numerous celebrities, big and small corporates have all visited Kibera to first hand witness the plight of the dwellers of Africa's largest slum. Their experiences have justified sponsorship and NGO funding running into millions of US dollars. An NGO is even more credible if it has a project running in Kibera.
It is given to see residents of this slum who consider themselves to be tourist attractions, having been used to attention from all manner of visitors from all over the world, interviews with international media, mercy tears, cameras and many freebies.
However the 2009 Kenya Population and Housing Census results statistically confirms the fame of Kibera to be media created. Kibera is neither Africa's largest slum, nor Nairobi's even. Muchiri Karanja, a Kenyan Journalist puts it thus;
For a long time Kibera has been touted as Africa’s largest slum, with various ‘experts’ putting its population at anything between one and two million. ...It turns out to one big lie. Not even the combined population living in all of Kenya’s slums comes anywhere close to the largest slum in Africa. According to the census, the total number of Kenyans living in slums is 618,916. ...According to the census figures, the eight locations that form Kibera slums combined host a paltry 170,070.
This factual revelation made a very important and delightful reading to me for two reasons.
Firstly, I have never believed in the labeling of Kibera as the largest slum in Africa and not amused at wastage of resources by having too many NGOs and GOs serving a small population. Estimates put it at about one organization for 15 Kibera residents. This is grievous and extreme, not to mention the exploitation of this lie to get developments funds, of which a good amount is not properly accounted for.
Massimo Barbiero, a the team leader of Community of Pope John XX111, a community based organization working in one of the slums in Nairobi says;
"a huge percentage of aid to Africa goes to servicing the lavish lifestyles of employees of particular programs. There are numerous NGOs that only make numbers because in their staff registers are salary makers and not development workers."
Given the status of life in Kibera is not much better, despite this ratio of N/GO to resident, Massimo's confession is candid, accurate and courageous.
Secondly, the revelation buttresses the serious doubts that UN figures and reports have been treated with, especially when talking about Africa and her issues. The United Nations states that up 16 million Kenyans live in Slums. In its report, Percentage Change in Slum Populations in Africa between 1990 and 2010, UN Habitat estimates between 40 and 50 per cent of Kenyans live in slums. Kenya has 38 million people. As per the census about 619,000 Kenyas live in slums. Where does that put the UN and it's report? Shame on the UN.
It is my hope that this revelation will spread as wider and as deeper as the lie of the biggest slum in Africa has spread, and erase it.
Read the article by the Kenyan journalist here
Kibera according to wikipedia.
Photo credit: trigallery & flickr.
Stats can be made to mean anything especially in a society that makes a habit of toying with figures... I would strongly encourage skepticism. At the end of the day a slum or slums are indicative of a wider economic problem, do we know what the issues are or are we to simply regurgitate what the world bank, IMF and NGO tell us.....
Ken Thumbi
This fact is of more help to solving the wider economic problem than exaggerated figures would be.
we were always in one of the "less bad" bits apparently, although these ranged from gated developments abutted by shanties to "proper" slums with roads constituted of 2m. deep of rubbish with sewers trickling down ravines gouged from the mess. The people we met would talk about the nastier parts of kibera, as though destitution was a goal to be strived
for, or as though Kibera is designated to make an impact; what i was being shown should be enough to shock, but if not dark whisperings of nastier corners should do the trick.
I felt that i hadn't really seen a slum. I felt that Kibera has become (and i say this without meaning to dismiss the plights of people who live there- it is a grim place, and the facts of the post election violence a few years ago are incontrovertible) the front line in the west's battle with it's own conscience, where we conspicuously play out our good works on the feckless African poor, where paternalism rebrands itself as inclusion and sustainable development and colonialism exports not diamonds or rubber but smug moral justification like papal indulgences.
For Kibera to play this role, there must be a common accepted discourse around the horror and the scale of the slum. NGOs, missionaries, journalists working in the slum or returning from a visit there need to be able to allude to "the biggest" "the oldest" "the most violent" "the poorest" "the slumiest" to make sense of their work to others, to reinforce the importance and value of what they do and to win the war for their own consciences.