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330,000 face homelessness in clearing of Kenya slums

Meshack Onyango was at work when the bulldozers came, but his neighbors rescued his mattress and kerosine stove before demolition crews plowed his ramshackle home into the red earth.

The tin roof of his shack was stripped off by thieves before the wrecking started, but he counts himself lucky to have saved a few possessions.

More than a third of a million people living in the slums around Kenya's capital, Nairobi, now face a similar fate as the government prepares to clear shanty settlements that have encroached on railway tracks and on land reserved for road-building.

The Onyango family's home was demolished along with 400 other tin-roofed mud shacks because it stood in the way of a planned bypass that cuts a 60-meter-wide strip through Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa.

"They came at nine in the morning when I was at work and my wife was at the market," Onyango said. "We slept in the church that night, and now we're at my brother's house because I don't have money to rent my own house."

Onyango, his wife and their four young children now live with his elder brother in a shack. Strings of tinsel are the only decoration and bedsheets are hung up to subdivide the space into a living area, kitchen corner and bedroom. There is no toilet or bathroom, no running water or electricity.

Kenya's government, which came to power in December 2002, is tackling the legacy of former president Daniel arap Moi, under whose rule large tracts of public land were illegally grabbed for private profit.

Slum landlords built on land earmarked for road-building and stuffed houses next to railway lines and under power pylons.

"I'm afraid of the government now," Onyango said.

"I'm just a poor person -- where can I go to raise my complaint?" Onyango said.

The forced evictions were halted last month following protests from the UN and the Vatican, but Kenya's roads minister, Raila Odinga, insisted last week that any homes built on land reserved for roads or other public utilities would be demolished.

The government has plans to clear the slums by building new housing estates on the outskirts of Kibera.
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