High population is not the problem; high growth of the informal sector is
By cancelling the results of the census in parts of North East Province, the census bureau has shot itself in the foot. It amounts to admission that the process left wide loopholes for manipulation.
A census is not an opinion poll. How do you give a margin of error when you are expected to physical counting of people?
The reasons the census bureau has given to explain why they do not agree with the number of the Somali population may very well be technically logical. But the whole saga has left the government wide open to charges of discrimination.
The stark message from the numbers is that we are over-breeding. In theory, this is bad for the economy especially because our population growth rate is higher than the GDP growth rate.
Yet I still believe that population control is not the highest of our development priorities. The numbers, per se, are not the problem.
We should be more worried about the pace and direction of urbanisation in the economy. Our people are moving to towns in droves and putting enormous pressure on the few towns.
It is most telling that slums and other forms of informal settlements are growing at a faster rate than formal settlements.
Nairobi, our capital city, does not have a formal commuter transport system. Instead, what is growing faster is the disorganised matatu sector.
The city is unable to cope with the burgeoning number of hawkers. The authorities have not constructed a single market for years.
For a long period, we had an urbanisation policy that put emphasis on the growth of secondary towns.
The theory was that by providing infrastructure such as housing and roads in middle-level towns such as Thika, Kitale, Homa Bay, and Malindi, they would suck some of the migration pressures from Nairobi and the larger cities.
It has not worked. Today, a good number of these so-called secondary towns are also suffering from the same phenomenon of informalisation: mud slums, boda bodas and unplanned concrete jungles.
Thika, which was constructed in the Kenyatta years as a satellite industrial town for Nairobi, has two twin slums aptly named Kiandutu, which means jiggers, and Matharau, Kiswahili for despise.
Yes, I agree that we are breeding at a phenomenal rate. But what I find more worrisome is the fast rate at which the economy is going informal.
In policy documents, we hail the informal sector as the growth sector and as a leading employer of labour. What our policy makers don’t seem to grasp is that informalisation of the economy is part of the problem, not the solution.
I have always found myself asking questions about the integrity of official statistics, not only on the contribution of the informal sector to GDP growth, but also to employment creation in the economy.
The truth is that the informal sector represents one of the most hostile and brutalising conditions of realising labour power. The informal sector is where young people go when the alternative is joblessness.
What do you say of a young, energetic youth who stands in the sun the whole day on Waiyaki way in Nairobi’s Westlands hawking puppies and rabbits?
Or the school drop-out forced to hover around bar after bar in Eastlands, his stock of capital being mitumba shoes, suits and counterfeit Chinese hi-fi equipment?
The informal sector is about maximum physical exertion, inhuman working hours, and meagre return for effort.
It is a manifestation of the population explosion. Our policy makers must not take comfort in its growth. Instead, policy should seek to eliminate this sector so that we can move citizens to more rewarding avenues of realising labour power.
The population increase per se is not our biggest problem. I am more worried about a shrinking middle class and rural peasants who have slumped into subsistence existence.
I am worried about the collapse of strong rural coffee societies. Of the fact that coffee plantation owners now find it more profitable to sell their farms for property development than to engage in farming.
The original population scare-monger, Thomas Malthus, predicted a population time-bomb in the 1790s. Right now, there are more people in China than there were on the entire planet in the era of Malthus.
Let’s discuss the population pressure issue in Kenya in the right context.
