Laundry done the traditional way – it consumes several liters of water, which, at some times of the year. can be in short supply.

If you want to see a country, don’t take a plane. The time, by plane, from Nairobi to Kisumu is just a little over 25 minutes; by bus it’s 8 hours. Eight hours of scenery and scents, children and oldtimers. In Kenya most people can’t afford the plane; many can’t afford a bus and must revert to the nefarious matatu – a converted 12-person van that will take as many as 21 people (I was on it!) and is driven at break-neck speeds, from speed bump to speed bump – the Kenyan way of keeping speed on the highway down.

However, this time I was on the plane, travelling from the Indian Ocean coast at Malindi back to Nairobi. Kenya was just a green smudge 35,000 feet below and my fellow passengers were all pretty well-heeled. To ease the time I resorted to the in-flight magazine. These contain snippets of information amidst a plethora of ads for various scents, fashions, wrist watches and exotic travel destinations – in a country where body odour goes largely without notice, many people have just one set of clothes, time is a relative, non-constricting factor, and the vast majority of people haven’t travelled outside a 100-mile radius of their homes and very few have left the country.

I was struck by a one-pager. The gist of it stated that within the next 10 years a large majority of Kenyans would move into cities and that the farmland they would be leaving behind would constitute a prime investment opportunity for agriculture……and people with money.

At the time I just thought WOW! How can anyone even conceive of this!? Right now the population is largely rural with people living off small holdings: raising maize and beans, chickens, goats and cows (the latter only if one is more wealthy). No one is well off but the land provides (or seems to) enough food to sustain the growing population. So if the land is bought up and people are moved into the cities what happens to them?

Right now, in Nairobi, there are large slums totalling over 1 M people. Many live in squalor. Every day I would see a steady stream of people walking from the slum areas into the city; they are looking for any work they can find. At the end of the day I would see them streaming back, obviously tired and looking haggard. Some – probably many – would have walked 10-20 kilometers that day, pushed handcarts with heavy loads, slogged bales, sold papers or trinkets or bananas amidst (literally) lanes of rush-hour traffic. If they were fortunate they would have made enough shillings to buy some food and pay some bills or rent; if less so, maybe just food; if it was a really bad day they would have to hope that their friends or other family members had made enough.

The bottom line is that there is simply not enough work to employ the burgeoning labour force and what work there is tends to be low-paying and episodic. I have often wondered why multi-national corporations have not been flocking to Kenya to take advantage of this large and under-used work force. I can think of two reasons right off the top: corruption and unskilled labour. Corruption is the bane of Africa, certainly Kenya. A company would have to grease so many palms and, even then, it would be iffy for the company to look forward to clear sailing as someone would always be trying to get their own piece of the pie through some form of subtle (or not-so-subtle) extortion. Even the top court in the land is corrupt – currently there is an investigation of a superior court judge and 5 of his cronies for taking a bribe of over 200 M shillings to influence the voting outcome for a political candidate. [Another glaring, but typical, example: a governor just recently was found to have billed 2 M shillings to start up a Facebook page – which, of course, is free.] The daily papers are full of reports of corrupt and fraudulent practices but…..despite the “noise” there never seems to be any resolution. The perpetrators are let off on some technicality and business continues as usual. [Not unlike our senate fiascos: if Joe Blow from the north end of Hamilton had bilked some folks out of $91,000 they’d be doing hard time in the slammer by now. No one would be coming forward with a cheque to cover the fraud and no specialized committee would be put in place, on the tax-payers’ dime. to counsel senators who might be facing similar problems.]

Skilled labour is in short supply in Kenya. Grade 8 is critical for students there. At the end of the grade every student in the country writes a series of exams (the same exams). The outcome will determine their life course. If you don’t make the cut-off you don’t continue in school even assuming you had the money – high school costs the student/family. The exams are based on book learning – mostly rote memory – but don’t involve anything technical. So what happens to the students who are “good with their hands” but aren’t into sitting at a desk 10 hours a day cramming obscure facts into their heads? Or what about the many students who are forced to skip school to help in the fields or, in the case of girls, are embarrassed about their period and so stay away? So unless a company is prepared to do on-the-job training it won’t look at Kenya as a resource.

Corruption and the impact of an unskilled labour force will limit the prospects of people moving to the cities to look for work. It will take wholesale, fundamental changes to impact this. Without them cities will be made up of slums – hordes of young people with nothing to do. A recipe for disaster.

It just makes sense to air/sun dry everything. Outhouses in the background.

Then I got to thinking about the logistics of city life; basic stuff like water, sanitation, and cooking. Despite living within 15 kilometers of Lake Victoria, one of the largest fresh water lakes in the world, people (mostly women) in the villages must haul their water from nearby ponds. In bad drought years this becomes a round trip of over 20 kilometers for some just to find ponds that still have water. Supposedly there’s a water-delivery system in place: water pumped through pipes to central outlets where people can take their jerrycans for filling. But….the pumps aren’t big enough or are broken and never repaired. The government funds slated for water transport developments or to make repairs are all too often siphoned off into officials’ pockets. The result is that people continue to have to haul their water from ponds.How will the new cities be serviced? Outhouses are the norm in rural Kenya. I don’t know how human waste is handled in Bondo (now a sizeable town but slated, soon, to become a city). I don’t know of any sewage lagoons in the region. Nairobi has a huge complex of lagoons at Dandora (a great place for birding) but I don’t think the sewage system reaches to the million-plus people in the slums. So I’m not sure about basic facilities…but I’m skeptical.

A large pile of brushwood being readied for charcoal production.

Cooking? Right now the main heat source, it seems, comes from charcoal. The little charcoal stoves I’ve seen appear fairly efficient. The down side is that they require….charcoal. This is made from harvesting brush, stacking it in piles, covering it with dirt and lighting it. It smolders for a day or two and, after being extinguished, is harvested and bagged. A large sack of charcoal will do a household for a month or so. Most people can extract the necessary wood from their own holdings without too much degradation – especially if they’re replanting (a concept that does NOT seem to have caught on, unfortunately). But where does the charcoal come from that people in the cities are using. Daily one can see bicycles or bodabodas (motorbikes) loaded with 2-4 large sacks being pedalled over 20 kilometers to the city for sale. Charcoal production is emerging as one of the greatest sources of environmental degradation in Africa. Most people cannot afford bottled gas and using the sun to offset heating needs has not caught on. So as people move into the city what happens to the countryside surrounding that city just in order to allow folks to cook?

The pile is covered, surrounded by green leaves and twigs, and soon will be lit to smoulder for 2 days.

Personally I can’t see how this 10-year flocking to the cities can work. My vision is one of hordes of people living in slums vying for any work that might come along…but living hand-to-mouth, day by day. But….it’s a prime investment opportunity for people, with money – so probably not Kenyans – to take advantage of.

But as testament to the basic optimism of people generally, and the Kenyans specifically, I was struck by the responses of Kenyans that I asked about this. “Do you think this is possible or realistic?’ Overwhelmingly the answer was always “yes”. And I guess that’s the necessary element: the human will to make something good happen. I hope I’m around in 10 years and able to see for myself.

Rick