Fire in Mukuru

A fire in a Nairobi squatter community claims 50 kiosks and homes, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation reports. The biggest tragedy: it took the city fire department two hours to arrive.

Squatter sanitation

Squatters in Mumbai have started investing in their own sanitation services. The Times of India reports on one community that is hiring 30 of its kids to collect trash. This novel program is a great step towards squatter self-government.

Cop is killed when squatters are evicted

The Times of India and The Statesman report on the Kolkata tragedy. The Statesman also adds that the squatters seemed unrepentant. It's hard to repent when "Bulldozers demolishing the abandoned structures of the squatters was the only sound that broke the silence in the Tollygunge-end of the rail colony this evening." There's no excuse for violence. But there's no excuse for police violence against the squatters--and for evicting people with no provision for where they will go in the future.

Abahlali Base Mjondolo

That's Zulu for shack dwellers. News24 reports on a true indigenous squatter uprising in South Africa, led by S'bu Zikode, a 30-year-old gas station attendant and father of four from Durban. "The ANC must use the power that we gave them to deliver," Zikode told News24.

This is exactly what squatters need: a pressure group. This guy's even been on TV in a debate with a government minister. Here's his group's slogan: "No Land, No Home, No Vote."

Onward!

(Here, courtesy of the hope for south africa blog, is S'bu Zikode's blast from the Nov. 9th Star newspaper.)

Christmas tragedy

A fire kills five and displaces 300 in the Phillipines, this Manila Times brief reports.

Mombasa Squatters fighting for land

Squatters in Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city, are asking the government to intervene in a dispute with a powerful landlord. The homes of 20,000 people are at stake, the East African Standard reports.

Shantytown Dwellers in South Africa Protest Sluggish Pace of Change

Majority rule hasn't bettered life for South Africa's squatters, The New York Times reports (registration required.) Here's how the article describes one Durban squatter community: "since Foreman Road's 1,000 shacks sprang up nearly two decades ago, the only measurable improvements to the residents' lives amounted to a single water standpipe and four scrap-wood privies."

More from the article: "The frustrations of slum dwellers began to boil over in mid-2004, when residents in a shantytown near Harrismith, about 160 miles southeast of Johannesburg, rioted and blocked a major freeway to protest their living conditions. The police fatally shot a 17-year-old protester. Since then, demonstrations have spread to virtually every corner of the nation. In Durban, the city is erecting some 16,000 starter houses a year, but the shanty population, now about 750,000, continues to grow by more than 10 percent annually."

President Thabo Mbeki is promising more for the squatters. But when and how?

(thanks to BC for the link)

Squatters Relocated in Manila

20,000 squatters along an abandoned rail line are getting relocated by the government, according to this article from The Manila Times. Their new homes will be within a 5 kilometer radius of the old squatter community, the newspaper reports.

Police Kill 3 a Day

The Los Angeles Times offers an assessment of police violence against the favelas in Rio de Janeiro: "In Rio de Janeiro state alone, police killed nearly 1,200 people in 2003, according to figures compiled by the local nonprofit group Global Justice — an astonishing average of more than three people a day."

AK-47s and AfroReggae

Reuters reporter Angus MacSwan visits the notorious Vigario Geral favela in Rio's Zona Norte. It's notorious for police violence (21 people were killed by the cops a dozen years ago in a brazen, thuggish murder rampage), for a low-level war with nearby favela called Parada de Lucas, which is run by a rival drug gang, and also as the home of AfroReggae, a musical/cultural group dedicated to ending the violence.

Next year, next year

For three years in a row, the Kenyan government has been promising that the so-called Kibera upgrading would begin next year. Why should 2005 be any different? So it's 'next year' again for the upgrading plan. And still, neither the government nor UN-Habitat (a partial sponsor of the plan) has revealed what it entails: which communities will be ugraded, with what kind of housing, who will get the new homes, what will the ownership structure be, what will the housing cost for the residents, etc. allAfrica.com reprints a short item from the East African Standard.

Blame the developers

Here's an article I missed from Nigeria's Tide Newspaper. Good words, and let's hope, a portent of good deeds to come:

Minister blames increasing slums on property developers
• Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Olusegun Mimiko has blamed private property developers for the growing number of slums in the country.

Mimiko said at the opening of the 82nd council meeting of the association of Housing Corporations of Nigeria (AHCN) in Abuja Monday, that the rising number of slums was a national embarrassment.

“The increasing number of slums in our cities and the rising population of slum dwellers are issues of national concern,” he said.

He said that the slums have resulted in insufficient water supply, poor sanitation, lack of security and the presence of disease breeding conditions.

He called on the association to collaborate with government in its quest to provide affordable, cheap and decent houses to the citizens.

He said that the present administration was poised to upgrade the nation’s housing delivery capacity as well as reposition the sector for efficient and effective services.

He said that the recently approved national policy on housing and urban development among others were measures adopted by government to meet the Millennium Development Goals for the housing and urban development sector.

Mimiko urged the association to undertake research in new ways and new materials that would aid mass housing delivery, stressing that “millions of Nigerians cannot yet boast of their own houses.”

Earlier, the minister of the FCT, Nasir el-Rufai, urged the association to support the FCT in the on-going restoration of the city’s master plan.

“As painful as the removal of the illegal structures may be, it is advisable to do it now or else the future generations of Nigerians will never forgive us as it will be done at a greater cost,” he said.

The minister who was represented by the Director, Public Building, Mr Kabiru Maina, tasked the association to ensure good sanitary conditions in estates, provide infrastructure and good environmental management.

Adopt a Light

I missed this when it was published last week. A Kenyan company is bringing floodlights to the major avenues of Nairobi's squatter communities. The Daily Nation (registration required, I think) notes that the cost of the massive 30-meter-tall arrays of 400 watt lightbulbs, will be born by corporations who will be allowed to display billboards on the giant masts. A big deal, but a small deal at present, as the article notes that only four of these light clusters will be put up in Kibera, a neighborhood that boasts 500,000 to 1,000,000 residents.

Has work started? What does it look like? Where is the power coming from (and if Kenya Power & Light can run lines to the lights, why not to the residents?) Please, if anyone from Kibera reads this, let me know what you think.

Temporary victory for Ahmedabad squatters

It's sadly typical: squatters under threat of eviction negotiate for a new tract of land. A few years after the deal is cut, the authorities forget all about it and start eviction proceedings to push the squatters from the new land that was legally allocated to them. Expressindia reports on the dispute, and how the squatters won a temporary court reprieve.

A class difference among squatters

Now I understand: the railway squatters who resisted eviction in Kolkata were a bit more well-off than their neighbors who accepted demolition and relocation. The Statesman finally reports the details: though the resistance has now been crushed, the 138 families who attempted to block the demolition of their homes had been on the railroad right-of-way the longest and were living in concrete homes, not sagging stick and mud concoctions. This small sector of the community is getting the worst of the deal--their homes are being destroyed and they are not being offered relocation. A tidbit at the end of the column suggests that there will soon be more demolitions in Kolkata. Scary.

Inefficient leadership

The Independent, a Dhaka daily, reports on a conference on urban poverty in Bangladesh, convened by the World Bank. "The country does not have an explicit policy on urbanisation and urban poverty, and this lack of any coherent, well-thought-out approach is a major challenge in approaching the challenges of poverty in Dhaka and other towns," said World Bank country director Christine I Wallich.

A better policy is a good thing--at least on paper. But it still has to be implemented. Dhaka is a city with 4,300 different squatter communities, the article reports. And perhaps there's some hope in this number. Perhaps squatters squatters can organize to challenge entrenched leaders and seize more control of their own communities. This would do more than a sheaf of policy pronouncements.

Blaze Leaves 1 200 Squatters Homeless

The aptly named Kosovo squatter community in Cape Town burns to the ground. AllAfrica.com has the story. Authorities say they will distribute 'housing starter kits' to the survivors--which appears to mean that they will be allowed back onto the site to rebuild.

No Refuge

More on the perils of being a squatter in Zimbabwe. from the Los Angeles Times (registration required.) Robyn Dixon reports from the ruins of Killarney, which, until is was destroyed six months ago under Operation Murambatsvina, was a shantytown in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city. The squatters were muscled out of town, only to find that they could not support themselves or feed their families outside of the city. So they have returned to Killarney and other areas, erecting rudimentary shacks, or occupying half-built buildings. "When the police come, they'll definitely destroy these shacks," one returnee, Jutias Muleya, 37, told the paper. "We are not really safe here."

The most desperate are dying, and the article features the story of Mavis Mkandla and her daughter Flora. Mavis, HIV-positive and unable to get treatment, died last month. Her six month old daughter died five days later of malnutrition.

'Spit back by the sea'

This Associated Press Dispatch (via the Las Vegas Sun) shows the disspiriting downside of aid as a means to empowerment. Again the lead says it all: "It has been a year since the tsunami laid waste to the isolated Indonesian province of Aceh, but tens of thousands of people still live in a vast archipelago of shanty towns made of scrap wood spit back by the sea." The reporter calls the aid effort "an invasion of good intentions and almost no oversight." Which I guess is why tens of thousands are still living in scrap houses.

Legalisms got in the way: "Only a tiny percentage of people who lost their homes turned out to hold title to their land. Often, their families had lived on the land for generations as renters or squatters, or their ownership papers had been lost in the tsunami. Compounding this were issues ranging from a shortage of timber to poor planning. As a result, thousands of survivors were left in tents and shanty towns that began slowly falling apart as Sumatra's brutal heat gave way to the rainy season."

The reporter doesn't ask about one thing I've heard: that traditional fishing villages are being denied the right to rebuilt on coastal land, while developers of tourist hotels are being given the green light. Certainly fears about the destructive possibility of another tsunami are real. But fishing villages need to be next to the water. This unequal and, indeed, colonialist re-allocation of land may be one of the biggest impediments to rebuilding the communities that were smashed in the tsunami.

Refugees or Squatters?

One hundred and thirty eight Kolkata families insist that they were given land by the state government before 1950 and that they are all refugees, and therefore shouldn't be evicted, The Statesman reports.