Having lived in Kibra for the past 39
years, activist Fatuma Abdulrahman says residents of the informal settlement
are not opposed to development but want the Nubian community to be accorded
their rights to land like other Kenyans ...
By Iddi Musyemi
Development always comes at a price.
Millions of shillings are solidified into brick and mortar. Roads run through
where people had their homes. Mud shelters are bulldozed to make way for modern
houses. The real cost of the coming development is that people will be left
landless.
Fatuma Abdulrahman has seen all this
happen. She speaks of development the way you would of any unwanted activity in
your community.
Fatuma
In 39 years she has witnessed the land
which Nubians used to own shrink from thousands of acres to only hundreds now.
Jamhuri, Ayany, Mbagathi and Langata were once Nubian farms or villages. As
they lost their lands they also lost the names which they had given the places!
Ayany was a farming village known as Lomle,
Fatuma recalls. “But when it was developed by the government our community did
not benefit from the houses but it was other communities who did.” Olympic was
Galalima, Jamhuri was Sarang’ombe, Karanja was Salama and so on.
She wants all developments stopped until
guarantees are made that her community will not suffer the dispossessions
executed by government and the local administration.
“No one hates development,” says Fatuma.
“But it shouldn’t be a way of denying people their lands or any form of
compensation whatsoever.”
Recently the Nubian Rights Forum, a
community based organisation which Fatuma works with, moved to court and
obtained an injunction against a Proposed Development Plan (PDP) headed by
Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
The PDP had set aside 300 acres of land for
the development of Nubian village. That is too little for a population of over
40,000 Nubian residents. And the conditions were open to anyone’s
interpretation.
“Kibra is our home,” says the fourth
generation Nubian resident of what has been referred to as a slum. “It is not a
slum to a Nubian, it’s a village we have known as our home.”
During the second presidential debate
Fatuma asked the candidates what they would do to protect the interests of
Nubians in Kibra and in Kenya.
President-elect Uhuru Kenyatta, in his
response, agreed that Nubians had been denied and deprived of their land
through the growing of informal settlement. He promised to work with the
National Land Commission to ensure that Nubians are provided with titles.
“In Kibra we want that land to belong to
the community that is there and to facilitate and to work with them to develop
that land and unlock its true value and potential,” said the incoming
president.
What Fatuma expects is acceptance by
Kenyans. She feels that Paul Muite’s response was as inclusive as she would
expect of any president.
The moderator, Joe Ageyo, asked Muite how
he would make sure that they are not dispossessed of the only land they know.
“By accepting them as Kenyans equally to
the rest of us,” he said. “They do not know any other country after their
ancestors were settled here.”
It’s the lack of acceptance, Fatuma
believes, that has made politicians invade their lands. Nubians have watched
helplessly the political class and the wealthy bureaucrats give away their
lands in the name of development.
But now they are fighting back. Fatuma
blames PM Odinga for being an obstacle in the way of Nubians getting their land
back. He has been dividing the community by compromising some to agree with
him. And by exaggerating that the population in Kibera is over 500,000 people,
he wants to make it look difficult that a solution cannot be found.
“The last census found the population to be
around 180,000 and registered election members were not even 100,000.”
By using the constitution and acting within
the bounds of law, Fatuma says that all is not lost. In fact her campaign has
been given a new lease of life.
Little by little this wife and mother of
five hopes to get whatever inch of land that was taken from them back. While
she realizes that it will be impossible to get everything back, the government
must offer another form of compensation to ensure that justice prevails.
She promises to contest any attempts to
exclude Nubians from participating in the county government.
Source- The New Dawn.
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