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The Documentary: The Slumlords of Nairobi

Kibera Slum Street View

10/03/2019 GMT

The Slumlords of Nairobi

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Slumlords of Nairobi

The landlords of Kibera who own hundreds of shacks and make massive tax-free profits

Who are the faceless figures who own hundreds of shacks and make massive tax-free profits?

In Nairobi’s slums, more than 90% of residents rent a shack from a slum landlord. These so-called slumlords have a less than shining reputation in the popular media, for exploiting the lives of the some of the poorest people in Kenya. 

BBC reporter Anne Soy takes one Kibera street as her starting point and investigates the ownership chain back to its source in an attempt to discover that there are bigger players and corruption on a much wider scale.

It turns out that there is no business like slum business. Who are the faceless figures who own hundreds of shacks and make massive tax-free profits? Who is bulldozing whole areas of Kibera and leaving hundreds homeless? We meet the activists who are bringing slumlords and tenants together to fight these mass evictions and the real enemy behind them. 

We also exmaine the structural reasons that might explain the so-called ‘Kibera Conundrum’ – why this slum defies all efforts to develop it. The answer, we discover, lies with land titles and those who benefit from maintaining the status quo, of keeping Kibera as one of Africa’s largest poverty traps.

Producer: Dom Byrne

(Photo: Muddy streets in the Kibera slum. Credit: Getty Images)

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