Adèle Charbonneau, « Managing conflicts in slums within a relocation project: Case study of Soweto East, Kibera, Nairobi », Mambo! Volume XIV (2), 2016.

Introduction

In developing cities, many slum dwellers have settled down in valuable road and railway reserves due to the lack of affordable housing. In Nairobi, the railway line which passes at the edge of Kibera has been heavily encroached upon. Willing to expand the national railway network, Kenya Railway Corporation (KRC) faced the challenge of recovering the space occupied by slum dwellers. The expansion being funded by the World Bank1, KRC was not allowed to simply evict the population. However, with the support of Pamoja Trust, a Kenyan NGO working in informal settlements, KRC decided to develop and implement a Relocation Action Plan (RAP) to move the 9005 project- affected persons (PAP) in Kibera and Mukuru, from the reserve to newly built houses few meters away.

Nevertheless, implementing large relocation projects in informal settlements can be particularly difficult. Indeed, slums are often characterized by complex and tense relations. Kibera is no exception, as the settlement has known various episodes of violence such as the post-election conflict in 2007-2008 or more recently the clashes around the National Youth Service program in 20152. The case of the Railway RAP in Soweto East, a segment of the railway line in Kibera, is interesting to study as it provides the example of a rather successful relocation project implemented in a slum. In Soweto East and Laini Saba, 1680 residential units and 1740 business units as well as an underpass are being constructed. This article wishes to contribute to the better understanding of informal structures in Kibera and their interaction within large urban projects. Based on 18 interviews of implementing staff, community members and KRC engineers as well as participative observation, this article will look at how the project reveals intertwined conflicts in Soweto East and to some extent in Kibera and how such conflicts were apprehended to minimize the risk of obstruction or violence.

The complex and tense land tenure claims in Kibera

The RAP originated from the need of KRC to recover the railway reserve, which has been largely encroached upon by slums dwellers. This land has a complex history of ownership, revealing the controversial use of urban land in Kenya by political leaders. The land around the railway lines does not formally belong to KRC; it is public land reserved for railway operation and maintenance. Part of the surrounding territory was informally granted to the Nubian community, descendants of the Sudanese soldiers at the beginning of the 20th century. However, from the 70’s, a large influx of people arrived from all over Kenya to Kibera settling down on the railway reserve and Nubian territory (de Smedt 2009a).

Such an expansion was condoned by local authorities and traditional chiefs who progressively allocated land to newcomers. One community member, who arrived in the 80’s, described the process through which he was granted the permission to construct a structure in Kibera: “Yeah, by then, whoever was concerned as elder of the village, he was the one concerned with the railway line kind of land. So some of us we were asking can you give me a portion where I can put a structure. He said well thank you, but you bring something small. So we were giving him or whoever that person was, who was by then the chairperson “Kitu kidogo” [something small]3. Such testimony is consistent with the well-known phenomenon of land-grabbing in Kenya (Obala and Mattingly 2014), whereby private entities seized large portions of the country’s public land. Yet, at the individual level, many slums dwellers constructed their wealth and patrimony by progressively building structures and renting them out (Goux 2003).

However, when KRC decided to concession the railway line in 2004, the massive encroachment on the railway reserve became a major issue. Obliged to clear the space, KRC asserted its claim over the land, disrupting the informal organization put in place and generating numerous conflicts. As one of the KRC’s engineer put it “It was not about the people around here […], these people don’t get here by themselves, they go through the chief, the DC, so we were not fighting the people who are actually living cause they would say, I have been given this by the DC, so you find you are fighting the district commissioner, the provincial administration, the chief. So those are people who are involved in allocating someone else’s piece. […] These are powerful groups. So even today you cannot go there put up a structure.”

The RAP project jeopardized the informal cartels, which are mainly constituted of the political and administrative authorities, the traditional leaders and the structure owners. Indeed, KRC was to destroy their structures ie. their source of income and of political influence in the settlements. Many structure owners and leaders gained an important power over their tenants as they could chase them away easily thus forcing them to remain loyal (Goux 2003). Such power could also be used by political leaders to gain votes and mobilize people. To make it worse, the government of Kenya was very reluctant to compensate absentee structure owners ie. people who own structures but do not live on the railway lines. It argued that they had already recovered their money and that they had collected income illegally without paying taxes. Within the RAP, absentee structure owners are thus only entitled to financial compensation but not to a housing unit. This difference of compensation was negatively received by absentee structure owners who organized themselves and opposed the RAP, but without really managing to change their compensation scheme.

In addition to the land claims of the informal cartels, the Nubian community saw the RAP as intruding on their ancestral land. Indeed, after independence, most of the land granted to the Nubians had been informally allocated to newcomers from different ethnic communities. In the absence of formal title deeds, the Nubian community was unable to stop the land allocation (de Smedt 2009a). Since then, the Nubian community has been demanding a formal and legal recognition of its rights over part of the Kibera territory. Within the RAP, the Nubians have constantly asked to be considered and consulted as beneficiaries in the segments of Mashimoni and Kisumu Ndogo areas. To discuss their claims, a seminar was organized by REMU, the Railway Implementation Unit, with the Kenyan Nubian council of elders where it was agreed that more Nubians would be included in the community structures. One of Pamoja Trust’s staff working on the RAP explained the conflict in these terms:

“The conflict about Nubians as it was the Nubians have always laid claim for ownership of the entire Kibera. […] And so when it came to projects in Kibera, they would see them as sometimes as interference on their land or rather as also they want to, by virtue of the claim they lay on the land, they also want to benefit from whatever project, regardless of whether it is targeted for them or not. […]. They were even flouting that from every 5 PAPs, the ratio should be 2 Nubians and 3 non-Nubians.”

(...)

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Managing conflicts in slums within a relocation project. Case study of Soweto East, Kibera, Nairobi.

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Managing conflicts in slums within a relocation project. Case study of Soweto East, Kibera, Nairobi.

Nom de carnet:

Date de publication:

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Introduction

The complex and tense land tenure claims in Kibera

Autres billets du ou des carnets de l'IFRE

Derniers contenus par mots-clefs

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