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More than any other region, Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s largest proportion of urban residents living in slums. These slums are home to 72 per cent of urban Africa’s citizens. That percentage represents a total of 187 million people. And their numbers are increasing on a continent where the annual average urban growth rate is 4 per cent - twice as high as Latin America and Asia. Already, 37 per cent of Africans live in cities, and by the year 2030 this is expected to rise to 53 per cent.
The story behind these figures published by UN-HABITAT depicts a situation faced by people in the slums far worse than many can imagine.
As Professor Akin Mabogunje, Chairman of the Nigerian Presidential Technical Committee on Housing and Urban Development and one of Africa’s leading urban thinkers warned some 700 mayors gathered for the Third Africities Summit in Yaoundé, Cameroon on 2 December 2003: “The very rapid spread of HIV/AIDS, with infection rates estimated at four times higher in urban areas than rural areas in some African countries has led to significant urban mortality rates.” Very poor environmental conditions that many poor urban residents face in Africa, have exposed them to life-threatening situations and considerably undermined the urban advantage in mortality on the continent. It is in the slums that many people, especially women, are forced to walk long distances to communal latrines, or to fetch water to their shacks. Thus the likelihood of rape is ever-present, while young people with little hope grow from being street children into criminals.
And as some of the photographs in this issue of Habitat Debate show, uncollected waste and poor water supplies spread disease in the city. Poor local management forces people to tap illegally into the electricity grid, or use liquid fuel stoves that can cause fires. An example: 5,000 people were rendered homeless overnight on 9 February this year when such a fire destroyed the informal settlement of Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town causing a major humanitarian crisis for the city.
What African towns and cities need said Professor Mabogunje, is a proper appreciation on the part of their central governments that it is only through real decentralisation involving proper devolution of power and resources to local governments that citizens can be truly empowered and made to effectively play their part in the development of their country. Local governments and mayors have to realise, for their part, that only by promoting true democracy at the local level can the rights of those within their jurisdiction be guaranteed.
“The hope then is that in the remaining years of this decade, central and local governments in African countries would decisively move to put in place physical, fiscal and institutional frameworks for transforming the social and economic circumstances of all their citizens through enhancing their access to basic services,” he said.
It was with such issues on the table that mayors and local government officials from across Africa concluded the Third Africities Summit. They elected Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, Mayor of the South African capital, Tshwane (Pretoria), President of a new umbrella organisation of local governments in Africa that has been provisionally called the Council of Cities and Regions of Africa (CCRA). It will represent Africa in May at the Paris meeting of local authorities from around the world which in turn will see the launch of a new global organisation, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG).
Reacting to the latest pan-African initiative, Pierre-Andre Wiltzer, the French Minister Delegate for Cooperation, told Habitat Debate: “This is a major breakthrough, a wonderful new step for urban Africa. It shows that Africa is now taking matters into its own hands and I have no doubt that the year 2003 will go down as the year of a new beginning for Africa. The Africities meeting shows that the mayors are ready to exercise their full responsibilities.”
Topping a list of 32 recommendations on issues ranging from health, water, education, financing, governance, culture, and energy to waste management, was the recommendation that local authorities in Africa be devolved into financially autonomous bodies administered by elected leaders with full powers to run their own affairs. Transfer of responsibility to local authorities had to be accompanied by equitable transfer of human and fiscal resources. Central governments, they said, should retain only supervisory powers to ensure compliance with the law and national policy.
In Africa the local authority community recognised that UN-HABITAT, the UN agency for cities and other human settlements, was playing a leading role as the UN system’s point of contact for local governments in promoting good governance. They also recognised the agency’s two Global Campaigns for Secure Tenure and Urban Governance as important mechanisms for building capacity for better local governance, and thus improved basic urban services. Plans are underway to engage the Global Campaign for Urban Governance in the African nations - Burkina Faso, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.
At the same time, they agreed that UN-HABITAT’s Global Campaign on Urban Governance and the agency’s Safer Cities Programme, initiatives of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), decentralisation policies, the alleviation of slum conditions and initiatives of other UN agencies helping youth at risk could help reduce crime and reduce poverty.
Mr. Duma Nkosi, Mayor of the sprawling industrialised East Rand adjoining Johannesburg, South Africa said: “All of us have slums, and we need to learn best practices from one another because it is too expensive to start reinventing the wheel here.”
Roman Rollnick is Editor of Habitat Debate |
