One day, those children born in IDP camps will rise and bite us all

The feature “The new Sodom and Gomorrah?” in Nation’s DN2 magazine on Wednesday, about the life of Kenyans living in internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps made for depressing reading.

That said, the crisis of IDPs in Kenya is part of a wider problem. It is estimated that there are anywhere between 24 million to 27 million IDPs in the world.

There are close to 12 million IDPs in Africa, which accounts for close to 50 per cent of the world’s IDP population.

In other words, IDPs are now easily a far bigger global problem than refugees (who are 10 million worldwide according to UNHCR estimates).

This is remarkable, considering that 25 years ago, most of us did not even know of the term IDP.

It is interesting looking at what, for lack of a better description, we shall call the “Africa IDPs Top Ten League Table”, derived from various estimates.

1. Sudan has 5-6 million IDPs.

2. The Democratic Republic of Congo has nearly 1.5 million.

3. Somalia has over a million.

4. Uganda has about 869,000 (down from nearly 1.6m in 2005).

5. Cote d’Ivoire has about 709,000.

6. Zimbabwe has 560,000 - 960,000.

7. Kenya has 250,000 - 400,000.

8. Ethiopia has about 200,000.

9. The Central African Republic has about 197,000.
10. Chad has about 178,000.

Kenya is the odd man out in this table. All the other countries have a history that often gives rise to instability:

Either they have had military coups, lengthy struggles of liberation and rule by militarist revolutionary movements (Zimbabwe), or violent rebellion against a post-independence government.

The fact that Kenya has not been under military rule, or a government that came to power by the gun, yet it is the 7th on the Africa’s Top 10 IDPs League Table, perhaps suggests that there is something fundamentally broken [beyond the early 2008 post-election violence].

One sign of that is that since the PEV, Kenya has passed a very unAfrican constitution in terms of how much it expands democratic space and civil liberties; had its most impressive medal haul at the Olympics in Beijing; produced the world’s fastest man in the 800 metres (David Rudisha); embarked on the what is easily East and Central Africa’s most ambitious urban infrastructure development, yet it has failed to end the IDP crisis.

The danger with this, if the experience of Uganda is anything to go by, is that unlike refugees whom you can put on a lorry and drive back to their country, the IDP problem stays with you and can produce future crises.

Now Northern Uganda remains the poorest part of the country. At the height of the war between the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels and the Kampala government, there were nearly 1.6 million IDPs in the north – then one of the highest in the world.

Because all sorts of international humanitarian organisations swamped northern Uganda to deal with the IDPs problem, life in the crowded and squalid camps was soon was actually better than the people had in their villages.

They had better nutrition, access to water, and medical care amidst the social degradation and disintegration. However, the children couldn’t go to school.

Darkness and misery, they say, can be a powerful aphrodisiac, so before long, the highest per capita population of Ugandan children were being born in the IDP camps.

Soon, you had a huge population of uneducated young people, growing up in the alienation of the camps, in a country they didn’t have a stake in…

Then, in a bizarre case of the Stockholm Syndrome, when the time came, a large number of the IDP camps’ younger residents didn’t want them dismantled because they would have to go back to the villages and do something they had forgotten to do in the camps – work for a living.

Look 15 years down the road when Africa’s IDP children are in their 20s and 30s, and imagine what they will do when they are able to organise some form of power. It’s a scary future.

In Kenya’s case, perhaps it should have closed down the IDP camps, faster than it passed a new constitution.