Nairobi infrastructure improvements hold water despite Twitter scepticism
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Version 0 of 1. It’s Africa’s most intelligent city; the most attractive for foreign direct investment, and one of the fastest growing urban centres on the continent. But Nairobi, sometimes vilified as Nai-robbery because of its high crime rate, also has one of the continent’s largest and most well-known slums, a very real terrorist threat, a skittish middle-class wary of security risks, and crushing poverty in informal settlements where living is expensive but life is cheap. Evans Kidero, 58, the governor of Nairobi county, is the man charged with fusing these identities. Kidero, who was born in the city’s Majengo slum as the eldest of seven children, is not alone in facing this conundrum. The world’s governments were tasked with achieving a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum-dwellers by 2020 under millennium development goal 7. That target has been exceeded, but in 2012 an estimated 863 million people were still living in slums, compared with 760 million in 2000. The proportion had fallen from 39% to 33% of urban residents, but rapid urbanisation pushed up the total figure. Roughly 60% of Nairobi’s population of 4 million lives in slums. Another target under MDG7 was to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, by 2015. That target was met by 2010, but about 663 million people are still without improved drinking water today. And on sanitation, 2.4 billion people in developing countries still lack access to improved sanitation facilities. These twin issues of water and sanitation bedevil Nairobi. “Right now, my biggest headache is to ensure we have infrastructure and social facilities like housing,” said Kidero, adding that the city needs, on average, at least 100,000 housing units a year over the next five years, but is getting only about 10,000 a year. Kidero said the authorities had enabled some people to move into new housing units in Kibera, Nairobi’s biggest and best-known slum. But the associated costs were too high for many residents. “Water was too expensive, electricity was expensive, and soon enough they were moving back to their shanties,” said Kidero, adding that the first step to improving lives in slums like Kibera had to be improving overall standards of living. “We need affordable water in the informal settlements; water in the informal settlements is 20 times more expensive … because of the cartels that supply water. So we are increasing the supply of water … so that it can be cheap and everyone can have clean, adequate water for drinking, for bathing,” he said. One initiative has been to install four water-dispensing machines that operate like cash machines. The machines were installed by the Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company, in partnership with the Danish company Grundfos. Since water from the dispensers comes directly from the municipality, it is just one-tenth the price of water trucked in by cartels. At the launch of one of the water-dispensing machines in June, Kidero said: “Partnerships like this ensure access to financial stakeholders as well as the technological knowhow necessary to not only increase the accessibility of water services but also make them affordable.” He acknowledged that his team’s budget falls short – a problem that also tested global leaders when they met in Addis Ababa this month to discuss funding for the sustainable development goals, which will shape the development agenda for the next 15 years. Related: Development finance summit: milestone or millstone for the world's poor? “Obviously, we don’t have enough money,” said Kidero. “I get 13bn shillings [about £3.2m] from the government, while salaries are 19bn. There needs to be rationalisation of staff so that a lot of the money we get goes into development.” Some Nairobi residents have been angered by the amount of money spent on giving the city a facelift before a visit by President Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, at the end of July. Obama will be attending a global entrepreneurship summit – and in preparation 500 young people are cutting grass on major roads, clearing bushes and unclogging drains. The last is timely – heavy rains in May and June led to an outpouring of cynicism, anger and frustration from Twitter users in Nairobi, with activist Boniface Mwangi describing the cleanup as “applying red lipstick on a corpse”. But Kidero denied that the improvements were just for the US president. “These are things we planned to do long before that,” he said. Public scepticism is fuelled by years of corruption allegations swirling around the Nairobi city and county authorities. In March, Kidero denied he was corrupt and said such allegations would not derail his development agenda. “My record in fighting corruption and cartels at city hall speak for itself, and I will continue working for the people of Nairobi diligently,” he was quoted by local news reports as saying. Kidero knows that pressure on the city’s strained services is going to get worse. “We have an average of 1.2 million people coming into job market every year, and 750,000 of them end up in Nairobi. We hope that [with] devolution the county governments will help us create satellite centres of development that will help curb the rural-to-urban migration.” In the meantime, he said, the city needs to improve its infrastructure to attract investment. He noted that some of the world’s biggest companies – including Google, IBM, and General Electric – have set up offices in the Kenyan capital. At independence in 1963, Nairobi’s population was roughly 300,000; the city is now home to about 4.2 million. He has estimated that the city’s population will grow to 14 million by 2050 and 27 million by the end of the century. “This requires that we provide the necessary infrastructure. Unfortunately, Nairobi has never had a masterplan. We have just completed the first masterplan, this provides for transportation, infrastructure, housing and social services provision of water and sanitation, schools and health facilities,” he said. The city is also trying to tackle its chronic traffic jams. Roads are being built and improved, and the often gridlocked roundabouts are being phased out in favour of junctions with traffic lights, Kidero said. The work is being funded by the World Bank and the African Development Bank, among others. Planned new shopping malls and upmarket homes may be a world away from the cramped shacks and mud paths of the slums, but Kidero said infrastructure improvements were crucial for job creation. “What will drive development is infrastructure,” he said. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation: without infrastructure, investors are not going to come. Without investors, we are not going to create jobs, without jobs …” |