Slums Are A Source of Insecurity In Africa
By: Amakhoe Gaoxas and Henny H SeibebAFRICA is on the verge of a major developmental take off. Business is booming, urban centres are expanding and the sky-scrappers are springing up in almost every major African city. And, as a result, rural Africa is getting increasingly neglected.
This net effect is rapid urbanisation. Yet, Africa’s rapid urbanisation is a prime mover of state fragility. Lack of integrated rural development strategies, lack of proper service delivery in rural areas, environmental degradation, civil wars, and prospects of better life has resulted in Africa’s cities growing at an estimated alarming rate of 15 to 18 million people per year.
Globalisation is a direct cause for urban fragility. Urban fragility leads to state fragility. As urbanisation accelerates, the security problems are likely to grow worse. Small African states, such as Namibia have in the recent past witnessed violent crimes against women and children.
Demands for jobs and stressed on its land, energy, water and other infrastructural needs have not been met. The net effect of uncontrolled rapid urbanisation is a perilous basket of crimes, such as illicit drug trafficking, cross-border crimes, violent crimes, armed robberies and riots.
In neighbouring South Africa, we observed how intense service delivery protests have led to deaths. Andries Tatane reminds us of one such case. Tatane was a 33-year-old South African citizen who was assaulted on 13 April 2011 by seven police officers and he later succumbed to the injuries inflicted on him during a service delivery protest in Ficksburg.
On 25 May 2005, Africa Day, the Zimbabwean authorities began “Operation Murambatsvina [get rid of filth]” to remove vendors and break down illegal shacks in Harare and across major cities, a process that displaced 700 000 people. In 2012, the City of Windhoek forcibly tried to remove people from the informal settlement, Sewende Laan in extreme winter.
Africa cities’ authorities cannot handle the ever-increasing rural-urban migration. Fragile governments lack either the will or capacity to deliver basic services to and provide security for their citizens. Stephen Commins, a lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, said that grievances around the lack of essential services, coupled with increased insecurity, crime, and lawlessness, contribute to greater levels of urban violence.
Rapid urbanisation is re-writing history. In terms of food, water and energy security it presents a peculiar challenge. It is expected that the majority of the poor in Africa will live in urban periphery in preference to living in rural areas by 2025. Yet, in terms of human development indicators, the poorest in urban areas are worst off compared to the poorest in rural areas. This amplifies susceptibility to poverty-induced instability, including the spread of epidemics and food shortages.
International agencies estimate that 300 million urban Africans will be without sanitation by 2020 and 225 million without access to potable water. In many instances the increase in basic food prices, coupled with inaccessibility to energy, sanitation and potable water led in recent years to urban riots in many African countries. Southern Africa is facing a possible electricity black-out with Namibia forecast to be one of the hardest hit.
According to the UN-Habitat 2008 Report, worldwide urban population levels of roughly 3.3 billion are projected to have doubled by 2050. The African urban population, however, is expected to more than double its current level of 373 million by 2030.
In many instances the reality is that the poor people in urban settings have a greater dependency on cash economy. Rural-urban migration in Africa contributes nothing to value-addition, job creation, industrialisation, and dwellers are normally exposed to pollution, poor sanitation, no energy, no communications networks, no access to primary health care and abrupt water cuts and shortages.
African governments should begin to realise that urban planning is an important integral part of its development. Urban fragility can lead to serious security risk. Local authorities should be therefore helped to spend more energy and resources on effective planning especially for land, including urban poverty and inequality.
This, in turn, requires improving rural governance and cultivating integrated rural-urban development strategies that involve cooperation between various spheres of government.
Amakhoe Gaoxas is a final year “land use planning” student at the Polytechnic of Namibia and Henny H Seibeb is the founder member of The Ideas Centre and co-edited the book ‘The Politics of Apologetics’ in 2010.