Eviction

I saw a gym friend yesterday. I asked her how she was.

‘Fine,’ she said, ‘but didn’t you hear? We were evicted.’

Evicted, as it turned out, Kenyan style.

This particular sporty friend is pretty unflappable and she relayed her story with a sort of resigned acceptance. In her shoes, I would have been traumatised, hysterical, enraged, baying for blood, threatening to sue, or at the very least....on the first flight out of Kenya....for good. (don't all cheer at once).

My friend rents/rented a house from a Kenyan owner and has lived there for a quite few years. The property has a pool, she’s spent lots of her own money on the garden, the rent was a huge 200,000 Kenya shillings per month, the landlord was nice. But last Friday afternoon she found forty men, including police officers with guns on her property. She was called out of the house and went to speak to them in her drive.

‘Your home is being repossessed,’ they said. ‘You have two minutes to get your valuables out of the house, then you have to get out, we are evicting you.’

They told her that her house had been sold at auction on behalf of the bank the week before. Nobody had thought to tell the tenants this, not the landlord and curiously not the bank.

Now, funnily enough, my friend said that she was talking with the rest of her family the night before about the horrendous situation in Haiti, which had led to a hypothetical conversation along the lines of ‘if you had only two minutes to grab your most treasured possessions, what would you choose?’
Her husband had said, ‘passports’, her two daughters had said, ‘teddies’ and she had said, ‘jewellery and my wedding photo album’.

Remembering this, my friend rushed into her house, grabbed the passports, two teddies and her jewellery box but she couldn’t find her wedding album – then, once done, the men came in. They ripped down her curtains from the window then laid them on the middle of the floor. Into the curtain they threw everything that was in the room, until it formed a large pile then, room by room, the bundles were dragged outside.

For instance, in her bedroom this meant her clothes, including leather jackets, got mixed in with her face creams and a vase of flowers full of water and Jik (a few drops of bleach). There was absolutely no respect shown for her property. Pictures were ripped from the walls, furniture, crockery, glass, decorative items, cooking oil were all thrown in together with linens and leaky cleaning products. When they tackled the kitchen the simply tipped her stainless steel fridge, still full of food, onto its side and dragged it out into the road.

My friend said that as she stood there, barred from the house, she thought about the bracelet that she had left in the living room by the TV. She also remembered how the landlord had called in earlier in the week and asked for rent in advance for March, April and May (Jan and Feb were already paid.) Her husband had given him a post-dated cheque and fortunately they later managed to cancel it. Meanwhile, my friend called her neighbour and said ‘sorry but we’re moving in!’ She and her gardener did their best to shift the possessions into the next door garage as they came flying out of the house and were deposited onto the road.

Next my friend had to do the school run, so took off in her car, picked up her kids and took them straight round to a friend’s house. She also managed to farm the guinea pigs and rabbits to friends, then deposited the tortoises over the fence into the nearby Giraffe Sanctuary.
When the men had finished they all stood outside in a row. One of the policemen told them to take off their clothes in order to prove that nothing had been stolen. Dutifully, the men removed their shoes and shirts.

‘Search them!’ he said to my friend.
‘No!’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of doing that! I’ll have to take you at your word.’

By this time, my friend’s husband had arrived having dashed from his office in the industrial area. The chief police officer walked over to my friend and stroked his truncheon across her cheek. Looking at the husband he said with a sneer,

‘See, look, your wife is fine and we could have done a lot more damage to your property if we’d wanted to. I think now you owe us all some sodas and nyama choma.’

With the guns in mind, the husband did as he was told and for some reason, probably in shock, found himself treating them all to a meal, sitting there in amongst the rabble as they ate and drank.

Now my friend is living in a hotel with her family. Her possessions have now been put into a storage container, but she will have no idea of the extent of damage to her property until she is able to unpack into a new house.

‘At least none of us were hurt’ she said, 'you do learn that people are more important than possessions,' My mouth gaped open wide for the full half hour whilst listening to the tale. All I could mange to say was, 'wow, you are so brave!'

‘The funny thing is that thinking about it there was nobody over to value the house, no assessors, no strange letters, phone calls or visitors, no warning whatsoever.’

Most shocking of all is that the exact same thing happened to somebody else living in roughly the same area, just before Christmas. Exactly as in this case, on a Friday afternoon, all the lady’s belongings were slung out onto the road by a gang of thirty or so men. She was heading out of town at the time but raced back to salvage her worldly belongings.

Apparently the bailiffs plan a Friday afternoon visit because it’s then too late for tenants to contact the courts and get the eviction stopped. They are also reported to spend the best part of Friday morning in a bar getting tanked up before embarking on their unsavoury work.
My friend eventually got hold of her landlord on the phone. He was very sympathetic but obviously a good deal less traumatised than the evicted tenants.

‘Oh, pole sana.’ He said, ‘sorry, I had no idea this was going to happen, poor you.’

This tale begs the question why are evictions taking place in this way? Why are the innocent tenants harshly punished for the sins of their landlords? What is the critical breakdown in communication? One can only assume that (hopefully) that the banks are unaware of the low-down practises of the bailiffs that they are outsourcing to.

Perhaps this is because in Kenya the concept of mortgages and accessing bank loans by using property as collateral is relatively new. Previously, everything was paid up front as you couldn't get credit anywhere. With the changes in lending, proper legal systems should be put in place in the event of repossession, for as it stands, the system is archaic and terrifying.

Feeling rather smug

Very often when I publish a very opinionated piece on this blog - it's followed by pangs of guilt. Did I go too far? Should I have left the topic alone? How many people have I offended?

If I'm honest, I did feel this exactly this way about my lambasting of Dfid. However, it's not often that a week later a British national broadsheet 'The Times' picks up on a similar tack and runs with it!! (though I do admit that I probably can't claim direct credit for this!)

‘The Knives are out for the Department for International Development’ Richard Beeston – 26/01/10
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7002259.ece

‘Where did the £300 million go? Doubts over aid to Africa’ – Catherine Philp & Philip Webster. 26/01/10
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7002255.ece

‘Dfid’s aid to Malawi is getting through, but it is hard to trace’ - Jonathan Clayton. 26/01/10
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7002290.ece

Car Trouble

In the past few weeks, I've been having a bit of car trouble. First my turbo blew up rather spectacularly (but fortunately only 300 yards down the road from our house), then my timing belt snapped on the school run causing all sorts of damage under the bonnet. This was the day after it had come out of a service. None of this has been very well timed, it being January and all that - and we are supposed to be saving up for my husband's 40th (at this rate it will be 5 friends, a can of beer to share and roasting marshmallows over an open fire). Add this to the 'coming together' I had at the end of last year (see previous post), it all makes for a rather bad track record. (I never quite had the heart to claim for the damaged wheel arch on that one).

I can only conclude that the problems were caused by my beginning to whinge to my husband about wanting to sell my car and perhaps trade-in for a newer model. The 1993 car with electric windows that don't work, intermittent a/c (gets a bit sweaty when the a/c packs up and you can't open the windows either - awkward for automatic parking barriers in shopping centres too), a leaking roof, no handbrake (making hill starts rather adrenaline fuelled) and tendency to gobble fuel was getting me down - but now I see that I should never, ever have bad-mouthed it. The revenge has been vicious.

Since my car has, for the past ten days, been having its cylinder head re-built, I've been driving my husband's car. It's been a most pleasant drive - a/c that works, a button that lets me check the temperature outside just for fun, surfing radio channels rather than being stuck on Kiss FM, volume control on the steering wheel. Meanwhile my husband has, chivalrously, been borrowing a 2 door pick-up that our eldest daughter calls 'The Ford'. The context being 'we don't have to go to the school bus in THE FORD do we Daddy!!' or 'you're not taking us home in THE FORD are you?!' N.b. She is very image conscious. Conversely the youngest said,
'Daddy's SO lucky?'
'Why?' I asked.
'He gets to drive the pick-up EVERY DAY!'

Sadly, the pleasant experience of borrowing my husband's car was marred last Wednesday when I managed to hoof it into the one in front on the bumps on Langata road. We were moving slowly and the vehicle 2 cars ahead unfortunately stalled.....while I was gazing out of the side window. Suffice to say that I didn't react quickly enough and somehow pressed my bull bar/bumper into the car in front's rather sexy VX spare wheel arm.

Both the driver in front and I pulled over, got out and inspected the damage - thankfully he was not too cross. When he opened the back of his car, I saw that the metal under the spare wheel looked admittedly crumpled. We exchanged phone numbers. I sheepishly handed over my husband's business card and scribbled my name on the back.

'Don't worry' he said; adding ominously, 'we'll be in touch.'

Later, once home again, I noticed that my (husband's) bull bar had somehow pressed back into the bonnet on impact and the tongue of mental that is supposed to support some kind of UN style aerial, but in our case is redundant, had caused a noticeable scratch.

My youngest was in the car - because we were on our way to kindergarten.
'Don't worry mummy,' she said, touching my leg, 'it wasn't a bad fault. I still love you.'
Phew.
The mechanic I spoke to later that day said something about stopping distances....

A friend phoned later that day.
'Your four year old daughter informs me that you had a crash this morning - I hope you are OK.'

Damn, I thought, I was hoping to keep this latest incident on the down-low. I already have a road near our house affectionately named by friends after me because I've managed to have two crashes on it so far!

I said on the phone, 'it was nothing really - nothing at all.'
I chose not to reveal that the estimate we had already received from the other car entitled 'this morning's incident between KA... and KA...' enclosing a quotation for repair was 37,000 shillings to bang out a bit of crinkled metal. No small amount. My husband had said, 'well, you must have given it a fair old whack didn't you?'

'Oh well, that's OK' my friend said eventually - (and after a lot of blushing on my behalf), 'glad it wasn't serious.....because I had a crash last Monday and just didn't want to feel like I was the only idiot driver this week.'

This morning, the man that I drove into last week waved to me jovially as we passed each other on the road. I winced. I hope my old car is fixed soon that I can go back to being incognito. All is forgiven!

Hog Charge

Some time at around the end of last term, my daughter came home from school saying that she had formed a team with three friends to enter the Hog Charge. This is a mini Rhino Charge for kids that they do on bikes. It comprises a three hour off road bicycling competition, with lots of manned check-points and rough/muddy bits in between. The aim is to raise money for the Rhino Ark Trust, conservation of the Aberdare Rain Forest and this event is staged by one of the Rhino Charge teams as their car's fund raising effort.

When our daughter first came home with the Hog Charge idea I thought OMG , she's gonna hate it. My eldest daughter is the one that didn't get around to learning to ride a bike until she was 7 and hated every moment of learning. Exasperated parents, we pushed and pushed her to learn using all sorts of bribery and tricks at our disposal.

'If you cycle to the gate and back five times then I'll give you a marshmallow'
'four' she would say. There would be a bit of negotiation then 'alright,' would be the reluctant reply.

I was never very sporty as a child, so have to admit that she's a bit of a chip off the old block, however, I had the sinking feeling that this time she was blissfully unaware of what she was letting herself in for. The words 'character building' were ringing loudly in my head and stopped me from saying anything.

For my daughter, up until this weekend, entering the Hog Charge was all about forming a team with her 3 best mates, thinking up a funny name for the team, getting t-shirts made, deciding what to wear etc.

Last term one of her team mate friends said, 'does your bike have gears?'
'No' said my daughter - without revealing also that her bike was also pink, called 'Daisy' and came with purple sparkly streamers when it was new.
'Well never mind' her friend said, 'only three of us have to finish the course anyway.'

When my daughter reported this conversation to us, her parents, her fate was sealed. I rushed out to buy her a mountain bike that was then to become her 'main' Christmas present - a great result for me as I wasn't sure what I was going to give her other than some clothes I bought in UK last summer. Not quite such fun for her though.

Revealing the bike on Christmas day was a bit of a damp squib. My eldest tried to say thanks tactfully, but you could see in her face that this was her idea of the worst present ever. To add to the moment, our middle 'tomboy' daughter said,
'Does it have gears?!?!' when she saw the smart black bike - eyes like saucers.
'Yes' our eldest said trying to hide her dejected mood.
'Ohhhhh-aw' said the middle on - plainly envious.

The first foray into the garden on the new black bike (a little too big to add to the problem), ended in tears.

I since learned that the kids bike shop that I visited sold out of mountain bikes, x120 in one week. 400 children took part in the Hog Charge.

Yesterday our four little 'Rough Road Riders' learned the true meaning of the word 'team'. (yes, I know, I know, we tried desperately to get them to change the name but what can you do - at least they weren't the 'bugs on drugs' or 'swine flew'!!!!).

The Rough Road Riders learned that the term 'team' does not mean bunch of mates having fun, in fact it means waiting endlessly for the slow one, encouraging the one who dissolves into tears, telling each other not to give up - that it will be worth it in the end and resist the temptation to shoot on ahead, or get grouchy, tetchy, bickering and mean - particularly when discussing directions. To be fair they all had their low moments during the contest, but toward the end, my daughter's seemed to last the longest. Anything I said made the tears worse. It was best to keep out of the way and let my husband take over.

My husband and two other dad's (the fourth had a broken leg so couldn't help) cycled along behind our nine year olds shouting encouragement almost all the way (this was apparently accepted protocol by the organisers). The 'tomboy' middle one followed along for fun on the Daisy bike, rather irritatingly overtaking her older sister on a regular basis. At one point my husband pushed our eldest daughter up a very steep hill, his hand pressing on her back as she rode. I'm not sure if that was cheating.

'Your team are looking like they are all over the place!' A friend shouted from her shiny VX, peeping at us through clouds of dust.
'Three are ahead, and one is lagging miles behind.' I winced inwardly but covered it with a smile and a wave.

In the end the 'Rough Road Riders' finished all of their checkpoints and recovered from their ordeal miraculously fast over a huge picnic under a shady tree. By afternoon the sun was raging down and burning all of us to a crisp, but it was a great event, centred around the kids, and for once without TOO much focus on winning a prize. It's the taking part that counts - that sort of thing.

January

I got collared by the flower seller who hangs outside the shop at the bottom of our road. We exchanged greetings, decided we hadn't seen one another for some time.

I said, 'it's good news about the rain isn't it?'

He said, 'before, we started the year with fighting - war, then with drought, this year we start with blessings; peace and rain.'

Raila Odinga and whoever will go with him (he hoped the whole Cabinet and all foreign ambassadors/partners would attend), is heading up to the Mau Forest tomorrow to oversee the planting of thousands of trees in the launch of the Mau restoration initiative. He says that he is starting the year with 'action', in order to restore Kenya's major water tower 'for our children.' The whole Mau thing has been highly politicised. Apparently Kibaki is not going.

On the ground.....there are lots of new faces around the supermarket, school playground etc. New kids in the classroom. New expat arrivals in town. That's always quite fun and keeps everybody on their toes. I have made a few mistakes in my cheque book writing '09 instead of '10. The usual thing.

It's quite something being at the start of a new decade.

British Taxpayer's money in Africa - time to blow the whistle?

I read over Christmas that the UK Government will have to find another £76 billion of public spending cuts over the next 8 years if it is to reduce its record £178 billion borrowing – (according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies) which equates to £2,400 for every family in Britain. (Sunday Times – Money – 13.12.09. Kathryn Cooper)

I also read that UK public workers may be facing pay freeze. Many teachers, doctors, nurses, civil servants, local government workers face pay caps, higher pension costs and increases in National Insurance payments. (thanks very much to my mother-in-law for regularly sending out a selection of UK Sunday supplements!).

Whilst cuts can possibly be made within Britain in the civil service etc. from my point of view, as a Brit living in Kenya, I might suggest cutting overseas aid budgets to bolster some of the UK’s national debt? I do not profess to be an expert but I do have had some limited experience within DFID and other international aid organisations so feel it’s OK to get on my soap box today.

What people in UK may not know is that right here, in East Africa and Nairobi, within the lucrative world of ‘aid to Africa’, given shape by huge organisations such as the UN, the World Bank, USAID, DFID etc. the world has gone officially crazy for the past ten years. Well staffed aid organisations with numerous highly qualified and trained staff running hundreds of programs routinely farm out work to external consultants, who then hire more consultants to organise their conferences, write reports, run their workshops and roll out their aid programs and schemes. It is what is known as the gravy train.

I was around to watch first hand when the overseas aid machine got gigantic. DFID (UK Department for International Development) started growing like crazy in 2000 and as a local hire admin staff in the office, it was a sight to behold. Back offices systems and accounts struggled to keep pace.

In the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit Blair reinforced this commitment to growth in aid to Africa. He set the agenda to focus on global climate change and lack of economic development in Africa – which was then endorsed by rock stars, concerts, Bono, Bob Geldof etc. It was all so RIGHT-ON with talk of cancelling African debt and lots of protesters etc. As a result, a central promise made by EU G8 countries attending Gleneagles in 2005 was to raise their aid budgets by £25 billion by 2010. Of this new money £12.5 bn would go to Africa. This equates to committing 0.56% of national GDP to go to foreign aid by 2010, 0.7% by 2015. Goes without saying, that’s a lot of money.

These pledges are all well and good and it would be fantastic to see economies strengthening in Africa, but it’s the ACCOUNTIBILITY side (or lack of it) of these huge organisations that niggles me. Aid organisations are not run like bona-fide businesses on ‘profit and loss’ basis, but simply are required to spend huge budgets, then justify it by writing endless reports with lots of statistics that no one reads, fiddling the figures to boast of immediate targets met. But who really goes back in five years time and sees that the money has been well spent?

What is patently clear is that the governments who are on the receiving end are not remotely interested in accounting for it once the money has been pocketed, I mean distributed. Who, in UK Government is asking retrospectively, was the investment of taxpayers’ money a success? While small charities and organisations can do this quite easily, once you are talking of budgets of over millions of pounds, the figures all get a bit hazy and once a certain percentage of the UK’s GDP has gone in the right direction, frankly who cares back home anyway?

I read in yesterday’s Daily Nation, (Jan 11th), Rasna Warah’s piece on ‘Whistleblowers’. She explains how, in the name of professional integrity, some are forced to blow the whistle on malpractice, corruption or abuse of office, only to be rewarded by feelings of isolation, betrayal and abandonment when after having vocalized concerns, whistleblowers the world over are treated by colleagues as social pariah. Some are even sacked. It is clear that poking your head above the parapet to tell some home truths never pays. When she blew the whistle on suspected mismanagement of taxpayers’ money at an international organisation she was met with denial and intimidation.

She writes; ‘a management consultant who I spoke to about my ordeal told me that this reaction is common in big bureaucracies where self-preservation – rather than productivity - is the driving force among managers.’

I clearly remember, whilst working at DFID as local hire staff, that unmarried consultants’ ‘partners’ were allowed to accompany them overseas, to receive a living allowance etc. Children’s school fees are paid, big cars provided, bi-annual ‘breather holidays’ laid on with flights and daily holiday allowances approved in the case of hardship postings (which TZ apparently was) etc. Let’s face it, in the private sector, you’d have to have a pretty damn successful business to be able to provide your employees with all these perks wouldn’t you?

Fine, you might say, the consultants are doing good work, but I felt that the principal beggared belief when this even encompassed the case of a twenty-something unmarried junior consultant who could somehow ‘prove’ that she had been with her boyfriend for two years and was then allowed to bring him over to Tanzania so that he could strum on his guitar and remain unemployed as a dependant for two or three years, courtesy of the British taxpayer. Needless to say, the relationship didn’t survive.

Looking after UK consultants in fine style might be well and good if concrete results were being seen but the news is usually depressing. At the end of Michela Wrong’s book, ‘It’s our Turn to Eat’, she described the difficulty the British High Commissioner, Edward Clay, was having in 2006/7, in persuading both the head of DFID and the World Bank that money given to Kenya was being stolen, particularly in relation to the Goldenburg and Anglo leasing scandals.

Since then, among other public money scandals in Kenya, there has been the 23bn shilling maize scandal and in December it was reported that the Ministries of Education and Finance in Kenya have failed to account for Shs100 million that should have been spent on the Free Primary Education program funded by DFID. Apparently the funds disappeared early in 2009. (see: http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/820998/-/item/0/-/109gea5z/-/index.html)

These figures are mind boggling, but at least in December the head of DFID Kenya & Somalia, Alistair Fernie and British High Commissioner to Kenya Rob Macaire, presented a united front to the press, of zero tolerance in the face of such outrageous lack of accountability. In fact DFID promised to withhold a Sh 1.2 billion grant until ‘arrests have been made’ within the ministries concerned. Though this is extremely sad for the Free Primary Education program, theft cannot be condoned. The problem is that it has all been too easy for too long.

From my whistleblower’s standpoint, I would say perhaps the UK Government, now in straightened circumstances, should take a magnifying glass to the money they have been throwing at overseas aid over the past decade. Is 0.7% of national GDP too much? Stimulating the economy through investment in business and world trade I wholeheartedly agree with, but throwing money down the drain via massive aid organisations run by overpaid ‘self-preservation’ driven consultants is no longer palatable for anyone in 2010, ironically, least of all to the Kenyans on the receiving end.

Rain is coming down

The rain is hammering down. It sounds like a riot of handclapping and stamping, its coming down so hard around our little house. A roll of thunder. There’s a drip, drip, drip sound on the ceiling board overhead. I’m lying in bed thinking about the askaris outside, wondering if they are managing to stay dry somewhere. Wondering about the slums, whether makeshift, corrugated iron homes are being washed away down muddy slopes. I wonder if a branch might fall from the big tree outside and land crashing onto our roof, or if the blue gums on the road side will topple over as their roots lose grip in saturated soil . A lightening flash. The news headlines last week said 25 dead so far due to flooding in Turkana district, clinics and schools destroyed. It seems that El Nino has finally arrived in Kenya. Not during last October or November, but in December and now on into January when traditionally it’s dry, dusty and hot.

My parents are staying. My Dad gives me a kiss good morning at the breakfast table and it catches me by surprise, or he wants to accompany me to the supermarket and hops in the car. Later, I notice that my mum’s hand is shaking as she puts the mascara wand back into the bottle. I make a mental note to make time with them, to sit and chat and not rush about in distracted circles thinking constantly about the next meal, and not retreat to my computer too much. I wonder if I can do it. Six monthly reunions are not enough. In six months I can grow a hard shell and forget that my family is any bigger than the husband and children around me.