We are recasting poverty as a personal failure, rather than a structural problem

On Friday night while walking from a restaurant after supper with a friend, I noticed something grotesque.

Along Biashara Street I saw a raised leather bench used by shoe shiners to serve their customers. The bench was different from most others in that it was one continuous bench without dividers or armrests. It was a nice bed of cushioned leather. It was a bench where someone could sit comfortably and even lie down.

Except that they couldn’t.

A chain thick enough to moor the Titanic ran up from its underside. Connected to the chain was a row of metal spikes firmly bolted on with a padlock big enough to secure the contents of Pandora’s Box.

The message was simple, it was not time for business and you aren’t welcome here. No one was. Other shoe shine benches, which were divided, such as two I spotted along Tom Mboya street, do not have protrusions to keep away soft human bodies. Even at midnight, they are left out in the open unguarded. You can sit. In fact, on Saturday night, I saw two shoeshine booths with weary people sitting on them at 11pm.

Metallic spikes do not protect the bench from vandalism. You can still take a knife through the leather. Spikes are also useless against the bench being soiled or worn of by the elements. They are there to primarily deter the undesirables - our growing underclass.

The owners did not want anyone to sleep on them during the night. The seat was a comfortable place for someone down on his luck to rest his head at night and dream of better fortunes the next day. This anti-poor hatred is so poorly thought out. The seat also cannot be used by guards or the sick, who need to sit down during off hours. Everyone is found to be undeserving when it isn’t on the clock.

Imagine this; someone spent his hard-earned money to buy spikes that run across the length of the bench, a huge chain and a padlock with for the express reason of preventing a fellow human being from seating or lying on it. If this not too much effort expend to be cruel to the destitute, I don’t know what is.

The message is clear, people who sleep rough are not welcome here, not even on a cold and wet night. Not ever. The attitude behind the spikes is surprisingly common. The bums who want to sleep on the bench at night are inferior to the bums that are perched on the bench for a shoe shine. The poor and destitute are inferior and unwelcome. In Kenya, we are recasting poverty as a personal failure, rather than a structural problem.

HOMELESSNESS ON THE RISE

As a nation, we do not save much. We cannot afford to. Most of us are a pay-packet away from being insolvent. The middleclass boom is financed largely through credit. Housing is a dream for the majority. The housing survey says that, “the vulnerable and low income segments of Kenyan population may never access housing from the open market.” It continues to say, “they may continue living in inhuman conditions in the slum areas, unless deliberate measures are taken by the government to address their housing plight.”

Even the statisticians are calling for the government to intercede in the housing market to protect the vulnerable.

A string of misfortune such as disease, divorce and loss of jobs might also have the middle class searching for benches to sleep on, only that we would only find a bed of nails.

Sleeping rough isn’t a lifestyle choice. It is an economic certainty in a misfiring economy. Along Moi Avenue every day, as soon as 11pm strikes, you see scores of people scrunched up against shop fronts sleeping on bits of cardboard box. You can make out the figures of some of them as children.

The housing survey released last year informed us that households led by under 18s are on the rise. Most of them are in Nairobi. These households have the lowest income. The number of rough sleepers in our capital is on the rise. The proceeds of our economic growth are ring-fenced by the already wealthy. The tide of a booming economy has only floated the yachts, while those on canoes are going under.

 It is true that absolute poverty under Kibaki fell as a percentage, however, the number of people living below the breadline actually rose. The same is true about the poverty on the continent. The percentages are going down, but the actual numbers of people living in poverty is rising.

Poverty is with us, and it will be for a long time. The problem is this open manifestation of hatred towards the poor. We all know poverty intimately in this country. It stalks the corner of our news bulletins. Even the richest families in Kenya haven’t had money three generations in. Our relatives in the rural areas could not survive without transfer payments, according to the latest statistics.

We know of want, we have heard of lack, and we pretend not to see the destitute.

Many blame the poor for being poor. Despite this idea being discredited and false, this idea is surprisingly common. Seebham Rowntree did his seminal study, Poverty, A Study of Townlife a century ago. It remains true for Victorian York as it is for boomtown Nairobi.

Poverty is a misfortune of circumstance, not a fruit of sloth. It is low wages, the lack of a social safety net, and misfortune that lead to poverty. It isn’t stupidity or weakness. Sharing is essential as a species. We had to learn to share as species to survive. Our women are unique in the animal kingdom as being unable to give birth without help. We have had to barter, pool together and protect our weakest to survive the rigours of the jungle in the formative days as a species. We must continue to do this. Too often, we concentrate on the rich and forget that an economy owes a debt to the weakest in the society.

I know it is private property, but it ought to be wrong to embody the fable of a dog in a manger in public like this. In fact, putting sharp spikes on a seat can lead to injury. The County government should surely put a stop to this. If you put up a bench that you use to shine shoes during the day, it should be free to use at night.

If you don’t want people seating on your bench while you are away, carry it home with you.

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FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION 

Let atheists register their organisations

The other day, religious leaders petitioned the Attorney General to revoke the registration of an atheist organisation. This puzzled me. Why is it that people in service of an omnipotent being feel the need to fight His battles? Despite the many torments of hell awaiting nonbelievers, they must deal with bullying from the pulpit in the here and now. Isn’t the best advertisement for your religion to fast and pray until these misguided heretics see the light and repent their sins? Why does their clubbing together threaten the clergy so much?

The certainty of the religious has always mystified me. No matter which religion you think is true, an overwhelming majority of the world does not agree with you.

The largest religious grouping on earth can only muster about 30 per cent of the world’s population as adherents. What are the chances that the religion indigenous to your geographical area is the right one? Why is your revelation better than that of someone in some other culture? The majority have heard of whatever religious belief being peddled and found it unconvincing compared to another variant. Atheists just go one step further.

As we beggar our children with debts and enjoy the infrastructure boom, we should remember that our benefactors, the Chinese, are in fact atheists. The Chinese Communist Party maintains that membership to the party is incompatible with religious belief. So the entire Chinese leadership is decidedly atheistic.

Our status as a God-fearing nation has not stopped us from going with a begging bowl to Beijing.

Everyone who wants a grouping based on activity or belief should get one. Christians should get theirs. Devil worshippers can get one. Atheists should also be free to make up their own organisations.

Also, if church elders really wanted to fight atheism, they should not give them the oxygen of media publicity by fighting them. It only makes their case seem stronger. They should concentrate on fleecing their flock.

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GEOGRAPHY MY FOOT

Learning cartography a waste of time

In 2011, a tourist at the Westlands roundabout armed with a map and a guidebook asked me the direction to Sarit Centre. I pointed to her android phone and asked why she hadn’t tried Google Maps. She asked, “You have that here?” Indeed we do. The first subject I dropped in high school was Geography. It seemed too much a mix of disparate things.

Then, I felt studying geography was a waste of effort. My views have changed a bit since then. It is important to know the dairy farming situation in Netherlands compared to the one in Githunguri for instance. Also, no other subject gives you a snapshot of your surroundings like Geography, it even reaches for the stars with a gander at the Milky Way.

I however do not understand why cartography is still important. When global positioning systems went live, maps became quaint creations. Computing has gotten so cheap, that the idea that map-reading ought to be learnt from first principles seems flawed and a waste of time.

Our young will in all likelihood deal with interactive maps on screens that tell them how far they are from their destination.

Wherever you are in the world, chances are that if you have a cell phone signal, a GPS satellite can tell you where you are. It is a bit like teaching of logarithms in mathematics - they were an inaccurate compromise from a time when computing power was in short supply.

Atlases, like log tables, seem out of step with precision offered by digital equivalents.