Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteSometimes I look at the two-foot high stack of papers spilling out of a box at my feet and wonder how that material--old receipts, research, magazines, correspondence, etc.--ever got so out of hand.
I tell and promise myself, I'll do something about it.
Two years out from the fire that accounts for the new small town digs--a very small apartment about 90 minutes north of Washington, D.C.--I am just now (but at least it's for real) getting around to cleaning up that mess.
Imagine if instead of facing up to 24-inches worth of neglected papers, one had to look out across a field the size of New York's Central Park and do something about the 800,000 humans dwelling in what has become a slum, east Africa's largest, mired in disease, desparation, and filth.
The first good thing, I think, to come out of Kenya's troubles over the past week may be the sudden, globally generated publicity for what should be every good politician's and every urban planner's worst nightmare: Kibera--and I'm going to call it "Kibera Slum"--an inexcusable testament to political denial, neglect, and venality.
As events in Kenya have so amply demonstrated, a relative handful of loose nuts, criminals, and criminal bands can put to flight a quarter of a million souls practically overnight, intimidate shipping and transportation, and otherwise distress millions of democratic, stable, and peaceful people to the extent that the contemplation of civil war appears on everyone's table.
This time around, after witnessing similar processes in Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, and elswhere, one knows from where the angry young men have been set loose.
What to do about Kibera Slum?
While humanitarian efforts grind away piecemeal at Kibera, this may be as good a time as any in history to consider or reconsider the following:
1. What the English called for criminals "Transporation", but this time around, produce land fit for settlement (and for God's sake compensate the owners) x 20 or x 40 and integrate those settlements into the agrarian and industrial fabric of the country;
1a. Please, no more aggregate population growth: a subject all its own, rising affluence and moderation in reproduction have been rumored (because I don't want to research the topic today) to go hand in hand, and if something like 40 new farming units are to be successful, keeping the numbers of hungry mouths to feed in a position where economics, politics, and technology may be made to work would seem part of the solution.
2. For factory and farm, bring on the pro Bono capitalists, politicians, and volunteers, and get in the administrative, educational and training systems that must plain make cities and towns work.
Raid the graduate schools; shanghai the educated; lock George Soros and Bill Gates in a room together until they come up with additional details in the plan to produce new settlements and dismantle Kibera forever.
*Carolina for Kibera serves 25,000 people a year through a health clinic, a summer youth sports program staffed by UNC-CH volunteers and other programs. The organization has closed indefinitely because of rioting in the wake of last week's disputed presidential election." [3]
"Think globally, act locally" has long been a part of the humanitarian's ethos if for no other reason than the fact that acting locally, practically anywhere in the world where guns don't prevent it, reduces the scale of the problem, which in turn makes addressing it possible. However, incidental do-good may well encourage feeling good about having done a little good while the larger situation continues to deteriorate.
Although charities work, and far be it from selfish old me to criticize them, governments work better when they're fueled by vision, focus, and a right and balanced sense of fair play and justive leavened with integrity.
Kibera--wasnt' it ever just a little bit of urban blight on Nairobi's rim?--signals national political failure. Should the people of Kenya finally wish to do something about it, let that planning and action be large.
I've had a little bit of fun here, but given the economic vitality demonstrated by Kenya at peace, one may be quite serious about establishing, laying out, and producing national administration for 40 New Towns, moving population to them, and moving trade through them.
Whatever the history and however nurtured the animosity, knowing that Kenya's middle and leadership classes lack in no way for intelligence and wherewithal--plus: the whole world really is watching, really is connected, finally, and really is standing by and ready to support its efforts--one may expect far better from the people of Kenya then the too familiar sinking into war and squallor that has so immobilized various of its neighbors.
1. Schlesinger, David. "What $26 can start." Reuters, July 12, 2007.
2. "Ancient Cities, Modern Slums." Atanu Dey on India's Development.
4. Deconto, Jesse James. "Kenya's unrest halts UNC aid." The News & Observer, January 3, 2008.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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