UN-Habitat is in Nairobi and so the local reality of slumlordism in the Kibera settlement there has been turned, in their documents that set the agenda for ‘global best practice’, into a universal phenomenon. But many settlements in KZN come out of the popular democratic politics of the 80s and are not run or rented by slumlords. But in spite this here in KZN shack settlements now face a state assault in the name of combating slumlordism and shack farming…The discourse of the UN is being used to justify an assault on the poor with the aim of expelling the poor from the cities. But there are some genuine commonalities between Durban and Nairobi. A global failure to provide basic sanitation to shack settlements (on the grounds that they are illegal, informal, temporary etc) means that flying toilets (and not slumlordism) are a genuinely global phenomenon.

http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3917962

THEY have been nick-named Kenya’s “flying toilets”, a makeshift solution to the appalling sanitation problems which threaten to engulf cities around the world as an army of migrants from the countryside drift toward the bright lights.

Addressing the World Environmental Education Congress in Durban yesterday, Gregory Odeke, of Kenya, gave delegates a brief insight into environmental challenges facing governments around the world as more and more people migrate to towns and cities.

Odeke, representing the Kenya Organisation for Environmental Education, said almost 60% of residents of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, now lived in slum settlements.

Because many of these slums were considered illegal by the government, hundreds of thousands of people did not have their own toilets.

In desperation, he said, many residents in the shacklands of Kibera and Mathare resorted to disposing of their human waste in plastic bags, which were then hurled on to pathways, drains or the nearest shack roof – giving rise to the name “flying toilets” or “scud missiles”. Odeke said attempts had been made to improve sanitation by establishing private latrines, but the cost of using these toll toilets was too high for many shack-dwellers.

With no municipal water supplies, residents also had no choice but to pay private vendors to fill their water buckets.

Because the cost of private water for an average family was about R3.50 a day, many families washed their hands and bodies in badly-polluted streams.

Prof John Ssebuwufu, from the African Association of Universities, said that 50% of the world’s people had now settled in urban areas and this “relentless migration” from rural areas was set to continue.

Peter Blaze Corcoran, from Florida Gulf Coast University, noted that half of the world’s people were under the age of 25 and that 20 000 Africans had died yesterday from extreme poverty and another 20 000 would die today.

“It is the young people who have the most to lose in this diminished future of ours, and we desperately need to put environmental education into the service of the poor and the world’s young people,” Corcoran said.

Published on the web by Mercury on July 5, 2007.