Kibera: It’s rich city folks who need slums most

The other week, a reporter from the Nation’s sister paper in Uganda, Daily Monitor, visited Nairobi and was given an initiation visit to the Kibera slums, Africa’s largest.

Like many foreigners, and indeed Kenyans, he was appalled by what he saw, and you could feel his horror dripping off the page on which his article was published.

Occasionally, you meet the romantic who is in love with the ‘‘creative drive’’ of the slums surrounding Nairobi.

And, from time to time, the cynic and hardened urbanite who thinks it is patronising to feel pity for Kibera citizens.

I too used to get all mooshy woosh about slums, until a University of Nairobi professor cured me of the fuzzy-headedness at a conference in Nairobi last year.

The conference had reached the point where everyone was warning about the crisis that East Africa’s cities, particularly Nairobi, will face from the explosion of the slums.

The violence witnessed in the slums during the post-election violence was the warning, the arguments went.

The university don got up and said the slums were a ‘‘necessary evil’’, and a very important ‘‘transitional phenomenon’’ and ‘‘conveyor belt’’ that feed a city the population it needs to survive.

I had never heard that stuff about slums being an important transitional phenomenon and conveyor belt. I was quietly impressed.

The room jumped on the poor professor, with quite stout arguments about how a slum and its brutal life can never be the first choice for the people who live there, and he was defeated. Or at least, he was hopelessly out-voiced.

Since then, I have looked at some subversive literature on slums, and I think the professor was on to something.

If we didn’t have slums, then people from the countryside would never move to the city.

Many good people frown upon this migration to the cities from the countryside, but it is misplaced.

Everyone deserves the comfort — or at least the greater opportunities — that cities offer.

If you are a teacher in a poor village school and decide to move and take your chances in Nairobi and are lucky to get a job, you might be a watchman earning Sh5,000 a month.