In Mathare, one of Kenya’s biggest slums, Jane Kalekye plods through the winding, murky corner to her tin-doo property. She and other residents who live near the rubbish-stricken Mathare River, which runs through their place of Nairobi, have started a clock that has been afoot ever since the disastrous storms that forced her to leave her home next month.
It is only a matter of time before their houses are brought down, they say, either by another episode of flood, or by the government’s continuing destruction of homes along rivers prone to flooding.
“Nyumba bado iko?” (“The home is still here”? in Swahili), the 37- yr- old secondhand clothing seller asks her neighbour, who gives her a grave smile again: “Iko” (” It’s however here” ).
“These days it’s a design – it rains about every day, and when it rains the house storms, probably not as much as the first time, but enough to keep us without a home”, says Kalekye, who is staying at a temporary shelter in a university with her three children.
Kenya has experienced some of its worst conditions in years since the wet time first started in March. Heavy rains have caused devastating floods, at least 228 people have died, hundreds have been displaced and almost 2, 000 schools have been affected. The state has foreclosed on all of the remaining institutions.
Over the past two days, there have been at least 23, 000 homes displaced, including Kalekye and her home. According to the interior ministry of Kenya and humanitarian organizations, there have never been before save calls.
“The number of individuals who need evacuation is increasing every day – some who are practically drowning, some whose houses are flooded, some who are marooned”, says Venant Ndigila, head of disaster activities at Kenya Red Cross, who says the effects of the flood cut across the money.
“This is the first time we have to use boats to enter middle-class estates,” he said, “very different from how we typically respond to the season.”
The impact is disproportionately bad for poorer areas. Mathare Valley, with roughly 70, 000 residents, is just one part of the densely populated “informal settlement” in Nairobi, and people are still reeling from the impact of the flooding two weeks later.
Open sewers have contaminated the water supply, and the medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières has warned that water- and mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria and cholera are “significant concerns.”
Streets along the settlement are lined with people’s belongings, muddy and battered by the continuing rain. The loosely held iron sheets are slowly peeling off the shack’s walls as the furniture has become so waterlogged that it is no longer usable. The place she has called home for a long time is hardly anything to be saved.
As she stands in the alleyway, she cries out, “I only have the clothes on my back now, and even these were given to me by the clothing shelter.” The water swept away the majority of her belongings, including important personal items and an old clothing bag.
Since the flooding, the nonprofit Mathare Social Justice Centre has organized fundraisers, clothing drives, and a community kitchen.
“People are traumatised”, says Wanjira Wanjiru, an MSJC activist. “We’ve seen many things in Mathare, but this is not the case.”
Despite warnings from the meteorological department, which predicted last year that the area would experience an El Nio weather pattern through February, causing extreme conditions, the government provides relief items to the area. However, rights groups have criticized what they claim was a slow response to the disaster.
Critics claim that President William Ruto’s dismissal of forecasts for heavy spring rain in October was downplayed.
Ruto instructed the military and police to support rescue and evacuation efforts on Friday, including providing relief food, medical supplies, and temporary shelters.
The meteorological department forecast that some parts of the country will experience heavy rains through May because the country’s infrastructure and slum housing are in need of new scrutiny as a result of the crisis.
Edna Odhiambo, a climate- action lawyer, says: “We can attribute the intensity of the rains to the El Niño phenomenon and climate change, but what we need to separate is the cause and its effects – the havoc we are seeing caused by the floods is a planning problem.”
Unplanned or illegal housing developments that obstruct the flow of water, settlements on riverbanks, and poor drainage systems have worsened flood impacts, she says. She adds that well-maintained infrastructure, such as dam sub-basins and embankments for rivers, is necessary to shield communities from the effects of the climate crisis.
About 70% of Nairobi’s residents live in informal settlements, which occupy about 5 % of the city’s land. The most vulnerable residents in a community are forced to live in the shadows of the settlement due to congested living conditions.
“The people who live along the river are the poorest of the poor, because a river house is around 800 shillings £5 a month, so this is a person who is already really struggling in their day to day”, says Wanjiru.
The government has announced plans to relocate displaced families and remove the buildings on riverside land near rivers and other high-risk areas. The relocation plan’s details were not provided in the document.
The demolitions, which began on Friday, have prompted a backlash from rights groups and communities. They called the removals “discriminatory”, claiming that only the homes of poor communities were being flattened, while those in affluent neighbourhoods went “untouched”. They added that relocation plans had already been put in place before the removals took place.
Residents were frantically removing any building materials they could from their homes to prevent further losses, according to Kalekye, who added that” we are stranded and in the dark]about what will happen to us.”
“If our house is being demolished, the government needs to tell us where we will go next”.