Demolition week! It sounded like the latest thrill series being produced right in front of our noses. Whether you lived in Lavington, Westlands, Kibera or Nairobi West, demolition was knocking at the door.
Two weeks ago, demolitions in Kibera paved the way for ‘development’, and this week in Nairobi West and Westlands, demolitions did away with ‘developments’.
A good number of people in large sections of Kibera lost their homes and livelihood after the government embarked on an exercise meant to “ease traffic congestion in the city”.
In other parts of the city, informal settlers were also evicted by Kenya Power and Kenya Railways to “avoid human injuries, loss of life and damage to property associated with railway lines and high voltage electricity lines.”
The middle class was not spared, as small business owners woke up to find NYS bulldozers bringing down the Southend Mall and Nakumatt Ukay, each constructed on a river bed.
How did we end up here? Such chaos could only have been created by the explosive mixture of two Cs, ‘corruption’ and ‘confusion’.
In economics, there’s always a formula for calculating the impact of an activity to the environment and people. The term for this is externality. A positive externality is when an activity has a positive impact on the environment and people. An example of this is when a farmer plants orange trees which provides nectar to bees kept by a bee farmer in the neighborhood.
A negative externality is when, for instance, a developer launches a factory that emits fumes which causes health hazards directly to people and environmental pollution.
Buildings built on riparian lands, on a balance, bring along a positive externality. This means it senseless to bring down a multi-million building simply it is built on a river whose water can’t even be used to wash a dirty car.
Such demolitions only serve to ‘discipline’ land grabbers which is still not as wise as it would to hang those who approved such constructions on these lands.
Bringing down a mall on riparian land causes unemployment and serious economic loses, it doesn’t reclaim the status of the river.
Sadly, the developers of the Southend Mall not only erected the mall right on top of the river, but actually deviated the course of the river. This seems to be the reason behind constant flooding in that area.
The current efforts to care for our environment are laudable, but reckless demolitions may cause more damage to the environment, to the economy, to the rule of law, and in the end, be more expensive to the taxpayer.
Authorities that did not care about giving consent to constructing on river beds will now have to care about total demolition and clearing of debris. The government wants to make it right, but it may have to be ready to pay billions in damages if appropriate demolition procedures are not followed.
When there is a building on riparian land, many of us want to see blood, immediate justice, to destroy it, blow it up! But democracy does not work like that.
Democracy is often inefficient and insufficient, and perhaps this is what makes democracy the best system to live in.
Dictatorships are more efficient in doing both good and evil. Revolutions are quite sufficient is spilling blood through “instant justice”.
Dictatorships and revolutions are incompatible with constitutional democracy, which is, for better or for worse, the system we chose to live in when we voted a big ‘yes’ in August 2010.
Our Constitution lays down a long inventory of social, economic, political, administrative, environmental and human rights and duties that citizens, the State and anybody who decided to stay, pass by, or do business in Kenya must respect.