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

Without a shack in the slum that such people rent for Sh500 a month, they wouldn’t survive in the city.

Not everyone who lives in a slum ends up there. Some eventually move to the slightly better working class areas, and then to the suburbs.

They might join the police, army, or improve themselves slowly. But eventually, several make it.

Some of them get to be MPs and ministers, and one day one of these people who started out in a slum could become president.

Some of the women (a friend swears that Nairobi’s most beautiful are to be found in the slums) usually get married to powerful men, or get by as pampered mistresses.

However, if you look thoughtfully at the slums from the leafy suburbs and central business district, the story begins to change.

There are slums because cities in poor Third World countries can’t survive without them.

Take the watchman who is paid Sh5,000. At that low wage, the middle class can afford to hire a watchman for day and another for night.

If there were no slums, and the cheapest accommodation a watchman could find was Sh5,000 a month, and all his other expenses were up accordingly, then the lowest a watchman or househelp (housegirl, to use the politically incorrect word) would be paid is Sh50,000.

At that wage, the middle class wouldn’t afford watchmen, househelps and nannies for their children.

Slums, therefore, are vehicles through which the urban poor subsidise its middle class.

For that reason, it’s the height of hypocrisy when the middle class moralise about how terrible things are in the slums.

In Kenya’s case, slums — all their risks notwithstanding — are actually a stabilising force.

The pressures created by the great land dispossession in Kenya by the colonialists, which continued after independence, were partly soaked up by Nairobi’s slums.

Nairobi is unique in that it’s the one African city that is ringed on all sides by slums and shanty cities — Kibera, Mathare, Kawangware, Mukuru, Kibagare, Kangemi, and Dandora.