Shelter the ‘forgotten’ in housing plan and restore dignity

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), in a report, ‘Affordable Housing in Africa’, estimates that a whopping 40,000 people troop to African cities daily.

With such numbers, it is easy to conclude that the majority in this exodus are drawn from the youth population, a majority of whom end up homeless or into sub-standard settlements considered unfit for human occupation.

INTERVENTIONS

According to the same report, Kenya’s housing shortfall stands at two million units. My own deduction, having toured Kenya extensively since I joined Parliament, is that the figure is understated.

In this light, the affordable housing pillar under the ‘Big Four Agenda’ is not a political wish list or a legacy mantra. Rather, it is a call to resolve a crisis demanding mindful and urgent interventions.

Mindful because it is easy to forget a legion of ‘invisible’ Kenyans who endure life in deplorable and sub-human dwellings. And urgent because, with an ever-bulging youth population reeling under runaway unemployment or underemployment, the housing crisis in Kenya can only get worse.

Clearly, the inclusion of affordable housing under the Big Four is, without a doubt, a great stride in the right direction. I particularly support the prioritisation of affordable housing because it will deliver decent homes.

It is a forgone conclusion by psychologists that nature influences human behaviour as much as nurture does; just as there are social atmospheres that foster lawless mindsets, there are those that promote temperance or moderation.

SOCIAL DECAY

Decent shelter dignifies. When people feel good about where and how they live, they are less likely to venture into some vexatious conduct. Despair and hopelessness have a way of summoning the worst behaviour in people; so do inhuman dwelling places.

The habitats we create for our people today, therefore, could end up determining how many of our young men and women get hooked on poisonous alcoholic drinks. The same will, in some way, determine how many miscreants and scoundrels we will have to deal with.

That, though, is not to say that dwellers in the so-called leafy suburbs are without their share of bandits, economic hit-men, degenerates and villains.

When wretched habitats become in-your-face reminders of the extent to which people feel cut off and undignified, the ‘hitting back’ instinct can easily transmogrify into crime and other indecent social conduct. Well, the law is there to stop those who engage in criminal enterprise wilfully, but it is the duty of progressive leaderships to stem social decay occasioned by deprivation. More often than not, miserable housing is a statement of deprivation.

Our habitats, to a large extent, determine how humane or receptive to rectitude we become. You cannot, therefore, divorce living environments from the character of people or, indeed, our increasingly elusive debate on national values.

So, how do we dignify the poor with decent shelter?

DIRT-POOR

Kiambu County alone has eight shanty ‘towns’ hosting thousands of residents, the majority of them internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the 2007/2008 post-election violence. The generic reference to these shanties is Kwa-Minyore (the place built with plastic waste) or Shauri Yako (a Kiswahili phrase meaning, in this particular context, “You are on your own”).

In my view, our technocrats are up to the task of drawing policies, plans and programmes for a wide range of government interventions. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, food, clothing and shelter are the most basic of human needs.

Housing and food in general – at least in my estimation – are more familiar areas of economic planning compared to industrialisation and universal healthcare. Yet I find an inordinate obsession with the so-called middle class among our planners and less focus on the dirt-poor, those that the Bible, in Matthews 25:40, refers to as “the least of these”.

As we seek to respond to the needs of other socio-economic classes, it is important to cast our eyes on those who are deprived into complete dispossession. They may not be ‘possessed’ as some of us tend to view them. Quite a number of these citizens of no fixed abode are persons whose dignity could be reclaimed by merely affording them a roof over their heads and basic clothing.

Ask me; in two short years, I have helped six such persons get a roof over their head. Four of them have since shed that shame-bound stoop and reclaimed their swag.

Ms Wamuchomba, the Woman Representative, Kiambu County, is a women studies PhD student at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]