They could not have chosen a worse time, the bulldozers of the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company, the municipal water company of the Kenyan capital, to carry out the order to demolish an entire poor district of the African metropolis, endorsed by the Government with an order that initially the High Court had blocked.
In times of restrictions and economic and social crisis for the expansion of the Covid-19 pandemic which, although not yet alarming, is now beginning to claim victims in Kenya too, leaving more than five thousand disadvantaged citizens homeless is an action devoid of any sense of humanity and solidarity.
Last night, hundreds of elderly people, mothers and children spent the first of many nights in the cold and soon, when the reclamation work on the entire Kariobangi North area will begin, they will have to find other spaces to build shacks with the few things they managed to save.
This is Africa too: the bulldozers were ready on site from Sunday night but until the last moment the inhabitants of the neighborhood hoped for a new order to stop the work, as has happened several times for twelve years until today.
In 2008 the area owned by "Nairobi Water" was illegally occupied by more than 8000 squatters who over time have erected their wooden and sheet metal huts. Shacks where they are often crammed in a few square meters and with very small windows entire families, even of six or eight people. The Government ensures that the residents of Kariobangi already knew that the eviction would take place and believes that the time has come to use the land taken from the company to solve the long-standing waste problem of the Dandora landfill by building a huge disposal plant.
In the meantime, however, twelve years of precariousness had become the rule for many people who had come to the capital with the desperate dream of improving their living conditions and, in the misery of an area that is barely more decent than a slum, they had never received a real eviction notice. And at every round of elections, some politician always came promising titles to those who had settled permanently in the area.
A resident of Kariobangi North told the local newspaper The Star that last Friday, for the first time, a meeting was called (with representatives, trying to respect the limit of "baraza" (public assemblies) that in the Covid-19 emergency was reduced to q5 people, where social distances and masks are almost totally absent.
The local Prefect advised the inhabitants to start looking for alternative places to move because in a few days the whole area would have been evacuated and the buildings removed.
None of those present believed that in the period when the slogan #stayhome was launched all over the world, not only in Kenya, and where people are asked to protect themselves and get out of their neighborhood as little as possible at least, the Government could allow thousands of people to be left in the cold and rain that is beginning to loom in Nairobi.
No one in Kariobangi North has title to the property, it is true. But many people pay rent to alleged landlords and cartels in poor areas who have built shacks. Even the kiosks and activities that allow so many Kenyans to take home the minimum necessary to survive, pay rent and licenses to work.
Yet in a few hours, under the control of the police, who have nipped in the bud any attempt at resistance, they have seen their daily life, their few certainties demolished.
Since yesterday morning in the neighborhood is mounted the protest: there are also those who come from rural areas in the north and can not return to their home village, both because of the blockade imposed by the government that has armored the County of Nairobi from other outside where the cases of viruses are on the fingers of one hand, and for the abundant flooding that are doing other serious damage.
There are those who ask to open the closed kiosks because of the Coronavirus to the poor families left homeless and those who ask the Government to think about alternative structures, also because in these conditions the diseases, and not only Covid-19, but also malaria, cholera and cold pneumonia especially in children, could cause a massacre.
The image of Kariobangi North is of those who, at a time when any action taken against an unarmed human being is doubly petty and ferocious, demolish hope.
In every corner of the country people are asked to wash their hands and stay at home.
In Nairobi it is a chilling paradox that the water company not only leaves you dry, but also takes away your home.
And the silence of those who are invoking respect for the fundamental rules to fight and win the battle against the pandemic, hurts even more.

(photo: courtesy facebook)