| City where flower-pots are more valuable than people | Send to a friend |
| Wednesday, 14 July 2010 11:10 |
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One of the reasons I decided to leave Nairobi and move to a small town on the Kenyan coast is because I couldn’t stand the schizophrenic, colonial nature of the city. Though I miss the fine dining, the cultural events, the great shopping and the beautiful weather, I don’t miss the fear, violence and extremes of wealth and poverty that characterise life in the city. Though I was born in Nairobi, and have spent a large part of my adulthood there, I have been finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the fact that the Nairobi I inhabited was not shared by a majority of the city’s residents. Nairobi definitely suffers from a bipolar disorder characterised by extremes of order and disorder, legality and illegality. This is a city where it is illegal to spit or urinate in public in one part of the city, but where, in another part, people have no choice but to use “flying toilets” when they need to relieve themselves. It is a city where, as Amnesty International reported last week, women and girls living in slums are too scared to use communal toilets at night for fear of being raped by their neighbours. The report, titled “Insecurity and Indignity: Women’s Experiences in the Slums of Nairobi”, states that many women and girls are literally prisoners in their own homes because they are too scared to walk to a latrine after dark. As a result, many have no choice but to urinate and defecate in plastic bags, also known as “flying toilets”. Nairobi is a city where you can be arrested for “sitting on a flower pot” in the central business district, but also where children play in and around raw sewage because they live in neighbourhoods that lack basic sanitation. It is a city where council askaris can take you to court for making too much noise, but where the screams of women being beaten or killed by their spouses are unheard. It is a city where watchmen are being paid Sh5,000 to guard buildings worth Sh50 million. In an essay published in the State of East Africa 2007 report by the Society for International Development, Godfrey Chesang notes that Nairobi’s two worlds are not just separated by degrees of access to services, but by “grammar and smell” as well. More than any other city in East Africa, he writes, Nairobi “epitomises the postcard-shantytown dichotomy”. The postcard part of the city is “geometrically organised, relatively affluent and relatively better serviced in terms of representational, welfare, sanitation and security needs”. The shantytown, on the other hand, is disorderly, unplanned and under-serviced. “Pigs and ducks have the honourable job of inspecting open city sewers as a matter of course and survival. The state in this part of the city is neither the protector of rights nor a provider of services ... For the most part, vigilantes rule the roost, funeral societies deal with the costs of transporting the dead home, merry-go-rounds are the accepted form of micro-finance, and the term ‘‘jua kali’’ is both literal and a main source of livelihood.” The irony is that the number of people living in the shantytown part of the city is equal to, if not more than, the number of people living in the postcard part. This has severe social and economic implications, which affect both parts of the city. In their book, The Spirit Level, researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show that people who live in highly unequal societies tend to be unhealthier and more depressed than people who live in more egalitarian societies. Their research points to evidence which suggests that happiness in a society is not so much a function of wealth, resources, culture, climate, diet or form of government, but is directly linked to the degree of equality among its members. They argue that highly-unequal societies tend to place a high value on acquiring possessions and money, which put people at greater risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder. “As inequality grows and the super-rich at the top spend more and more on luxury goods,” they write, “the desire for such things cascades down the income scale”, which increases levels of anxiety among those groups that are unable to acquire such goods. Levels of violence and crime increase as a result, leading to lower levels of trust and weaker community life, which make societies and the individuals living in them (both rich and poor) unhealthier and unhappier. So, as Nairobi strives to a world class city, its planners must consider the fact that levels of inequality will ultimately determine whether the city is liveable or not. Rasna Warah is a commentator on political and social issues based in Nairobi. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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