Constant demolitions of homes, structures and other infrastructures have become a norm in most African urban areas. These demolitions are classed. This can be observed by studying the ongoing (re)construction of a Shell petrol station in Kileleshwa, on the affluent side of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. The petrol station is under reconstruction at the exact location it was deemed illegal four years ago. This prompts us to reflect on race and class in Nairobi’s demolition history. A reflection that shows how the landscape of Nairobi is not only an archive of British colonialism but is a continual perpetuation of the colonial project of discriminatory citizenship, inequality and structural violence.

During British colonial rule the now affluent areas of Nairobi such as Kileleshwa, Westlands and Karen were reserved for white colonialists. Africans were only allowed to enter them to offer their labour under strict scrutiny imposed through the Kipande identification system which tied them to an employer. The African population was to be a transitory workforce in Nairobi, not a permanent one. But as time went by and more Africans came to the city, they started building houses in the east side of the city because neither the authorities nor their employers provided housing. Demolitions soon became a norm in these areas, where “African villages” were constantly set on fire to, in the words of Wangui Kimari, to “make the city legible to empire—racially, spatially, ecologically, and economically”.

Contemporary urban demolitions

Current demolitions are justified under the banner of cleaning up and building the city to attract investments. Projects set under this banner often include roads, for example the recent building of the elevated, 17-km-long expressway connecting affluent sides of Nairobi with the airport. Demolitions for construction of a link road connecting an industrial area to the expressway in 2021 caused a humanitarian crisis as about 40,000 people were left homeless, and forced to fight back on the street, in one of the popular neighbourhoods, Mukuru Kwa Njenga. The other set of projects that involve demolitions are heralded as restoring the “green city under the sun” and often include efforts to clean the Nairobi river.

In 2018, there was a marked increase in demolitions on ‘riparian land’ – this is land which is adjacent to rivers and streams and is subject to periodic or occasional flooding. The demolition spree was led by a multi-agency task-force consisting of the then newly formed Nairobi Regeneration Committee, along with the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and the county government. Here, they argued, they were recovering riparian land from illegal land grabs. In August 2018 buildings in different parts of Nairobi were bulldozed. What was new and unexpected to most Kenyans was that some of these demolitions were in the affluent suburbs. For example, news of demolition of a Shell petrol station and adjacent Java House cafe at Kileleshwa, and the Ukay mall sparked shock amongst the investors and on social media. These buildings and others caught up in that phase of demolitions were claimed to be on riparian land.

However, it is important to note the fragmented governance of riparian land in Kenyan laws. Confusion exist on how to measure riparian land. There are overlapping mandates for their protection in at least eight pieces of legislation passed by parliament over the last decades. These are sometimes contradictory. For instance, the 1999 Environmental Management and Coordination Act defines it as ranging from a minimum of 6m and a maximum of 30m from the highest watermark while the 1989 Survey Act recommends 30m from tidal rivers. These fragmented and incoherent laws and policies continue to cause confusion. They have also created a legal loophole which the authorities and Kenyan elites have exploited to order demolitions and land grabs over the years.

During such demolitions, heavy security is used. This demonstrates the normalised structural violence. The 2018 riparian demolitions were also executed in the early hours of the morning or at night, causing great insecurity and vulnerability. Court orders and legal title deeds by residents are often ignored, leaving residents to fend for themselves and with no compensation.

Classed rebuilding

However, after exactly four years, the Shell petrol station demolished in August 2018, is currently under reconstruction in exactly the same location with permission and licence from the necessary agencies, including NEMA as seen from the construction site board. During its demolition the official statement by the environmental management body was that it was encroaching on riparian land and was also on a road reserve. Its reconstruction demonstrates the recolonizing nature of demolitions in Nairobi: when they are enacted against the working class they are permanent but when carried out in affluent areas they are only temporary with loopholes that the elites can exploit to rebuild or receive compensation.

Towards urban justice

In her book, The Struggle for Land and Justice in Kenya, Kenyan legal scholar Ambreena Manji explores the law relating to land and its administration. She studies the country’s rich but scattered ‘land archive’ through which she shows how land law has been the most emotional part of Kenyan laws. She further shows that the struggle towards land justice is ongoing in a variety of different ways, including through case laws. In regards to urban demolitions, some optimism about the possibility of ending demolition or moving towards the creation of a proper compensation structure can be seen in recent court judgments.

In the case, Mitu-Bell Welfare Society v The Kenya Airports Authority, the court noted the discriminatory aspect of demolition by pointing out that while the informal settlement, Mitumba village near Wilson Airport, had been demolished, adjacent multi-story buildings were left untouched.The judgement demanded that demolitions are accompanied by reasonable alternative accommodation.

Building on this precedent is the judgement in William Musembi vs The Moi Educational Centre Co. Ltd lodged by residents of two informal settlements who had faced the bulldozers in 2013 after occupying the pieces of land in 1968. The Supreme Court noted that even when the residents did not have the legal titles to land they acquired a protective right to housing through occupation.

Together, these judgments if respected, may lead us to urban land justice. But this will require an end to the recolonizing aspects of demolitions that has normalised the near-constant demolitions of homes and structures in working class neighbourhoods of Nairobi.

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The author would like to acknowledge and appreciate the support of Ambreena Manji in reading earlier drafts of this text.

This article was first published by ROAPE.

“Most farmers can no longer produce adequate food for their families,” says Vladimir Chilinya. “Profit-making entities control our food systems… including the production and distribution of seed.”

Chilinya is a Zambian coordinator for FIAN International, an organisation that campaigns for the democratisation of food and nutrition.

Worsening harvests, infertile soil and increasing food poverty are affecting the majority of small farmers across the globe, especially in the Global South. Wheat prices have surged by 59% since the start of 2022.

In May, UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres warned that the number of people living in famine conditions has increased by more than 500% since 2016, and more than 270 million people are now living in extreme food insecurity.

While Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated this crisis (Russia and Ukraine account for 30% of the world’s wheat exports, constituting 12% of traded calories), climate change and capitalism are the primary engines behind this global food emergency.

The IPCC has estimated that by 2030, global warming will have diminished the world’s average agricultural production by more than a fifth. In Zambia, the maize harvest for 2021/22 is expected to be down by a quarter, thanks to droughts and flash floods between 2019 and 2021, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan experienced their highest recorded temperatures in March and April since records began 122 years ago. India has since banned wheat exports (after the government failed to buy enough wheat to cover its food security programme), which has further exacerbated the global wheat shortage and soaring global food prices.

But the climate and food crises are not isolated phenomena. They are the result of a global capitalist system – and a neoliberal agenda – that has prioritised big corporate agricultural profits over people and the planet.

Corporatisation of agriculture

This process really took shape during the so-called “Green Revolution” in India in the late 1960s. This movement was a collaboration between India and the US (with USAID and the Ford Foundation being key actors) and was dependent on agrochemical usage and intensive plant breeding.

High-yielding hybrid crops were introduced – the main one being IR8, a semi-dwarf rice variety – alongside the use of fertilisers, pesticides and lots of groundwater (these high-yielding crops required a lot more water). Calorific food was valued over nutrition, and these foods had costly inputs.

This shift towards big agriculture and more profitable monocultures made small farmers more dependent on expensive chemical fertilisers, forcing them into ever greater levels of debt. In India, 10,677 agricultural workers were reported to have taken their own lives in 2020, many of them farmers trapped by mounting debts resulting from the high costs of these farming inputs.

Unfair terms of trade and global lending – enforced by multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – are also to blame.

Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), introduced by the World Bank following the debt crisis across Latin America and Africa after the 1979 oil crisis, coerced poorer countries into privatising their public sectors and reducing their welfare mechanisms.

Adhering to strict policy packages in nearly every key sector – from agriculture to education and healthcare – became compulsory in exchange for any future loans from the bank or the IMF.

SAPs meant indebted countries across the Global South had to convert from prioritising indigenous crops that the local population depended on, to producing cash crops for export. As a result, local populations and farmers became more vulnerable to food scarcity – due to the negative ecological effects and decline in food accessibility.

Zambia: seed privatisation

In Zambia, for example, the structural adjustment agenda included the privatisation and liberalisation of the seed system. It began with the liberalisation and deregulation of ZAMSEED in the mid-1990s, which led to a decline in support for farmer cooperatives. In addition, the priority of maize as a cash crop has led to a decline in crop variety, meaning the local population has fewer food sources available.

“Under recent policy changes, priority is given to maize production. This is one of the key drivers for monocropping, which is responsible for the reduction in varieties of available foods in Zambia,” Chiliniya from FIAN told openDemocracy.

FIAN is documenting how the corporate control of agriculture is weakening food security. Seed systems have gone from being cooperative-led (which gives farmers more agency and fair prices) to being corporate-led (which prioritises profits).

“Farmer-managed seed systems have been replaced by commercial seed systems,” Chilinya said. “Most smallholder farmers are unable to purchase seeds at the commercial price and hence they cannot grow any food.”

These commercial seeds are also more vulnerable to extreme weather conditions. “Most people focus on cash crops at the expense of other crops that are more resilient to extensive weather changes. In the wake of extreme weather changes like those experienced in 2020 and 2021, the country falls into a food shortage,” added Chiliniya. According to the World Food Programme (WPF), 48% of the Zambian population is unable to meet minimum calorie requirements.

Kenya: food crisis

OpenDemocracy also spoke with food justice activists in Kenya, which is experiencing a severe food crisis. “Land degradation is affecting food production in Kenya because of the overuse of chemical fertilisers,” said Leondia Odongo, co-founder of social justice organisation Haki Nawiri Afrika.

As in Zambia, the disastrous legacy of SAPs is to blame. In 1980, Kenya was one of the first countries to receive a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank. It was conditional on reducing essential subsidies for farmer inputs, such as fertilisers. This process instigated a shift towards farming cash crops for export, such as tea, coffee and tobacco, instead of farming key staples for the local population, such as maize, wheat and rice.

“Agricultural inputs that were previously provided to farmers free of charge went into the hands of private entities under the guise of efficiency,” Odongo explained. “This has resulted in smallholder farmers being abandoned to the mercy of transnational corporations in the seed and agrochemical industry, which dupe farmers with information about seeds and chemicals.”

A recent report by Save the Children and Oxfam found that 3.5 million people in Kenya are already suffering crisis levels of hunger – and this is likely to rise to five million. Meanwhile, only 2% of the $4.4bn required in humanitarian aid (for Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia) has been funded.

Structural adjustment has made Kenya into a cash crop exporter. In the country, malnutrition remains concerningly high, with 29% of children in rural areas and 20% of children in cities being stunted. Despite experiencing deficits which threaten its population’s food security, Kenya remains a vital exporter of cash crops, with major exports in tea, coffee, vegetables and cut flowers.

Keep it small and local

Despite occupying less than 25% of the world’s farmland, small-scale farmers provide 70% of the world’s food. In Kenya, Haki Nawiri Afrika is resisting the corporatisation of agriculture by assisting local farmers with technical knowledge. Teaching smallholder farmers practical skills allows them to reclaim agency over their land and crops.

In Zambia, FIAN is helping small farmers return to indigenous farming practices and seeds to build resilience and improve food security. By diversifying food systems and abandoning monocultures, small farmers can continue to provide enough food for their communities, and at lower costs.

These small farmer movements are up against ‘Big Philanthropy’, such as the controversial Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is replicating the Green Revolution corporate-first strategy.

Still, they hope their struggle to decommodify and rebuild a sustainable relationship with the land can help realise the UN’s second sustainable development goal: ending hunger by 2030.

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This article was first published on Progressive International.

The decision seemed natural at the time. An economic storm was looming once again. This one looked really bad. The time was now or never, I figured. The financial rat race was sterile. So was the associated environmental destruction. I had long wanted to work on environmental issues. I set out to grow food in harmony with nature.

The honeymoon period with the environmental activist groups I latched onto was short. Meetings seldom seemed to get anywhere. Neither did petitions nor protests. You’d be hard pressed to find anything less effective than this if you were a propagandist tasked with setting up a controlled opposition psyop. It’s basically all shout and no do.

The rage against fossil fuels quickly felt nonsensical. An effective way to reduce their use would be to simply promote ways to do so. The elephant in the room is food. Take the supply chains, the warmongering to secure them, and the jobs needed to buy the stuff. Concerned activists ought to be promoting gardening. (Some do.)

The anger about species extinction was just as misguided. An effective way to avoid it is to simply promote ways to get yields without habitat loss. Alley cropping is one such way. The hedgerows offer countless benefits. They are profitable and allow to harvest water as a bonus when done right. That helps alleviate erosion, droughts, and floods.

More generally, the solutions that are being touted to us are appalling. Carbon capture will soon let fossil fuel giants rebrand themselves as climate saviours. Carbon offsets are all too often funding neo-colonial land theft and commercial tree plantations. Green tech is nothing but a Rube Goldberg’s machine with an egregious environmental footprint.

The most misguided environmental concept is that of ecological limits. Scarcity is not a fatality. It arises only when control freaks get to split the pie. These people simply don’t understand fertility. They lock up nature to keep her safe and then get yield by beating erect weeds into submission. We can nurture abundant ecosystems instead.

Over time, The Science began to look like nothing of the sort. The 2020 lockdowns, for instance, made clear that the carbon hockey stick was not about fossil fuels. That did not stop leading environmental voices from celebrating the drop in fossil fuel use that year. Atmospheric CO2, meanwhile, increased like clockwork.

The most misguided environmental concept is that of ecological limits.

The fossil fuel narrative, it occurred to me as I wondered why that was, actually hinges on an accounting chicanery. International carbon accounting rules treat industrial and natural emissions differently. Give or take exceptions like cow burps, natural emissions get stashed inside a carbon stock black box that keeps them out of sight.

Forestry research on soil emissions shows how little sense this makes. A cleared forest generates several kilograms of CO2 per square meter over the next few years. These emissions go away as the canopy recovers. Leaving one behind by thinning the forest instead produces no such emissions. That’s a lot of emissions that go unaccounted for.

Farm fields also produce soil emissions. In the past, hedgerows would keep fungi alive, prevent erosion, and help soak up soil emissions tied to tilling and harvesting. Modern farm fields, by contrast, are wide open spaces with no canopy. The soil emissions are so huge that you can tell when farmers are tilling or harvesting in NASA visualizations.

In other words, the carbon hockey stick is a hedgerow and canopy loss problem, not an energy problem. Farmers and loggers could turn it around with simple adjustments to their operations. Alley cropping would put the hedgerows back in without getting in the way of machinery. Soil cover would help reduce water evaporation as a bonus.

Water, in passing, is the actual link between human activities, carbon, and climate. Soil with less carbon content and less cover retains less water. That leads to desertification: water evaporation, wildfires, droughts, and floods. We can rehydrate our landscapes to avert these effects. We can even do so at scale with bulldozers and seed pellets.

Environmental concerns, in the end, are overstated. Farmers and loggers got misled by control freaks decades ago. They are now discovering that working with nature creates far more abundance than working against it. Doing so reverses the poor decisions of the past. There is as such no urgency, let alone a crisis.

A lingering question to my mind is what we can do to end this clown show. Seeing how terminally corrupt our institutions are, we might need to defeat The Science one person at a time. Fossil fuel, indigenous, or other interests might be able to defeat it in court. (Happy to help.) My sense is that land stewards will need to defeat it on their fields.

The latter carries the risk that, against a backdrop of fallowed land tied to fertilizer and diesel shortages, these regenerative efforts get repackaged as proof that the fossil fuel narrative is correct.