Kenyan Slum’s Rent Battles Reflect Plight of Migrant Workers

President Daniel Arap Moi’s palatial residence in Kabernet Gardens comes with a view: a patchwork of rusting corrugated tin roofs as far as the eye can see.

Moi didn’t have to travel far when he visited the giant Kibera slum a few weeks ago and said that rents for the brick houses, cardboard dwellings and mud huts were too high and should be reduced. The pronouncement sparked a rent strike by slum dwellers and, last week, fierce ethnic clashes between mainly Luo tenants and their Nubian landlords who trace their origin to neighboring Sudan.

On Sunday, Kenyan authorities continued their efforts to restore calm to East Africa’s largest slum. So far, about a dozen people have been killed and hundreds more injured in battles in which the combatants hacked and beat one another with machetes, daggers and wooden clubs.

“If they try to destroy us, we’ll react viciously,” said 32-year-old Abdullah Ali, a Nubian whose family rents out several shacks. “We don’t have guns, but we have many daggers and Allah on our side.”

The rent battle in Kibera is part of a problem seen across much of Africa, according to Johnnie Carson, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya. Many rural residents relocate to urban areas searching for jobs and a better life, only to encounter unemployment, a lack of affordable housing and other social ills. They settle in places like Kibera, where about 700,000 people are crammed into an area smaller than some American university campuses.

Kibera’s roots are deep in Kenya’s colonial past. The British government allowed Sudanese soldiers who served in the King’s African Rifles division to settle in a then-forested area about five miles from downtown Nairobi. The mostly Muslim Nubians erected shanties but never got deeds to the land.

As the Luos, Kikuyus and various other ethnic groups came to Nairobi in search of work, the ramshackle homes became a source of income for the Nubians. Rents for the majority of homes range from about $4 to $12 a month. The average Kenyan earns less than $1 a day. Many homes, which measure about eight feet by eight feet, lack running water and electricity. In desperation, residents use plastic bags in their homes for toilets, then tie and fling them as far as possible, creating health hazards.

On Sunday, even amid the tension, the Olympian Kipchoge Keino and other famous Kenyan marathoners helped kick off a fund-raising campaign to “stop flying toilets.” Funds raised by the campaign will be used by Amref, a local health charity, to build latrines for Kibera residents.

Tenants have long complained that their landlords didn’t deserve the rents they demanded. And with Kenya’s economy in its deepest recession since independence in 1963, some residents say they can no longer afford to pay. They say rents in many Nairobi slum neighborhoods have risen steadily even though residents of the capital’s more posh communities have seen their rents decline.

After Moi’s pronouncement that rents should be reduced, Energy Minister Raila Odinga, a Luo politician whose constituency includes Kibera, visited the area, suggesting rents should be slashed by 50%. Violence quickly followed.

Last week after some tenants refused to pay their rents, several houses were torched during the night by roving gangs. Riot police who were called in to restore peace made dozens of arrests. Thousands of people fled their homes, carrying their clothes and furniture.

Kibera resembled a battlefield, with smoke billowing from shacks and a mass exodus of refugees.

“When they came over to the [Nubian] area, we chopped their heads,” said 18-year-old Hussein Ahmed about the treatment received by Luos, who also trace their origin to Sudan. “Even our mothers and our children helped us fight them.”

At a government office adjacent to Kibera, hundreds of mainly Luo residents sat with their mattresses, dishes and other possessions, waiting for transport to take them back to rural villages.

Betty Kageha, 25, said she and her five young children were lucky to escape their burning home without suffering injuries.

“This is not what we came to Nairobi for,” said Kageha, who paid $4 a month for a one-room shack. “There is less opportunity in our village, but we’re safer there for now.”

A few hundred yards away, Nubians who took refuge in the Jamia Mosque told similar tales of horror. Khadija Mohammed, 32, described how she and her six children escaped through a hole in their mud hut from the Luo gang that torched her house.

“The house was burning and the children were screaming,” she said.

Opposition politicians blamed Moi and Odinga for the clashes in Kibera, saying they are stirring up ethnic tensions to mobilize voters for next year’s elections. Odinga said he and the president were trying to address a pressing problem.

Not everyone is convinced.

“It was clear the motives were entirely political,” wrote columnist Gitau Warigi in the Sunday Nation newspaper.