6 - Restructured Citizen–Government Relationship in Kenya's 2010 Constitution and the Right of Hawkers to the City in Nairobi
Corresponding Author(s) : Esther Wangui Kimani
Africa Development,
Vol. 46 No. 1 (2021): Africa Development
Abstract
This article interrogates how various actors in the Nairobi Central Business
District (CBD) space have made sense of the 2010 Constitution’s expansive
provisions on socio-political and economic rights to advance hawkers’ claims
to the right to the city. Using Lefebvre’s and human rights notions of the
‘right to the city’, the study finds that the Constitution has immense potential
to secure the hawkers’ right to the city. However, various challenges impede
efforts towards its realisation. Firstly, the 2007 no-hawking-in-the-CBD
bylaw exerts inordinate influence, in practice suppressing the Constitution’s
aspirations. Secondly, the City authorities’ efforts to facilitate the hawkers’
right to the city remain ambivalent or dependent on the whims of the
serving governor. Thirdly, initiatives by other actors remain elitist, topdown
and opaque with only the superficial involvement of hawkers. On
their part, hawkers’ initiatives to claim their right to the city have suffered
from fragmented leadership and individualistic self-help micro-strategies.
Furthermore, hawkers have underutilised judicial activism as an avenue
for challenging the constitutionality of the city bylaws banning hawking
in the CBD. This strategy would potentially have provided a discursive
platform to make their claim to the city the moral-legal claim envisaged by
the Constitution.
Keywords
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- Attoh, K.A., 2011, ‘What kind of right is the right to the city?’ Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp. 669-685.
- Bassett, E.M., 2016, ‘Urban governance in a devolved Kenya’, in C. Silva, ed., Gov- erning Urban Africa, London: Palgrave-Macmillan.
- Bocquier, P., Otieno, A., Khasakhala, A. and Owuor, S., 2009, Urban integration in Africa: A social-demographic survey of Nairobi, Dakar: CODESRIA.
- Brown, A., 2010, October, ‘The “right to the city”, From Paris 1968 to Rio 2010’, in Ponencia presentada en la 11th N-AERUS Conference.
- Brown, A., 2017, ‘Legal paradigms and the informal economy: Pluralism, empow- erment, rights or governance?’, in A. Brown, ed., rebel streets and the informal economy: Street trade and the law, London and New York: Routledge.
- Charton-Bigot and Rodrigues-Torres, ed., 2010, Nairobi today. the paradox of a fragmented city, Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers.
- Cheeseman, N., Lynch, G. and Willis, J., 2016, ‘Decentralisation in Kenya: The gov- ernance of governors’, Journal of Modern Africa Studies, Vol. 54, No.1, pp. 1-35.
- De Soto, H., 1989, The other path, tr. by J. Abbort, New York: Harper and Row. Forkuor, J., Akuoko, K. and Yeboah, E., 2017, ‘Negotiation and management strat-egies of street vendors’, in Developing countries: A narrative review, New York: SAGE Publications.
- Africa Development, Volume XLVI, No. 1, 2021
- Gachigua, S.G., 2016, ‘Legislating for a de jure one-party state in 1982 and “party hopping” in 2012: Reconstructing elite discourse on political parties in Kenya’, in D.O. Orwonjo, O. Oketch and A.H. Tunde, eds, Political discourse in emergent, fragile, and failed democracies, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 298-317.
- Gibson, K., 2005, ‘11,000 vacant lots, why take our garden plots? Community garden preservation strategies in New York City’s gentrified Lower East Side’, in Rights to the City, Vol. 3, pp. 353-366.
- Government of Kenya (GOK), 2008, Nairobi Metro 2030: A world class African metropolis, Nairobi: Government Printer.
- Hart, K., 1973, ‘Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 61-89.
- Hart, K., 1985, ‘The informal economy’, Cambridge Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 2,pp. 54-58.
- Harvey, D., 2008, ‘The right to the city’, New Left Review, Vol. 53, pp. 23-40. Herrera, J., Kuépié, M., Nordman, C. J., Oudin, X. and Roubaud, F., 2012, ‘In-formal sector and informal employment: Overview of data for 11 cities in 10 developing countries’, Women in informal employment: Globalising and organising working s, Cambridge, MA.
- International Labour Organization (ILO), 2013, Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture, 2nd ed., Geneva: International Labour Organization (ILO). Available online at http://www.ilo.org/stat/Publications/WCMS_234413/ lang--en/index.htm). Accessed January 2020.
- Joshi K., 2018, ‘Conditional’ citizens? Hawkers in the streets (and the courts) of contemporary India, Articulo —Journal of Urban Research, Vol. 17–18. Available online at https://doi.org/10.4000/articulo.3383.
- Kamunyori, S.W., 2007, ‘A growing space for dialogue: the case of street vending in Nairobi’s Central Business District’, unpublished PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Karuga, G. ed., 1993, Actions towards a better Nairobi: Report and recommendations of the Nairobi City Convention: ‘The Nairobi we want’, City Hall, July 27-9.
- Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), 2016, Micro, small and medium estab- lishment (MSME) survey: Basic report, Nairobi: Government Printer.
- Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), 2019, Gross product report, Nairobi: Government Printer.
- Klopp, J. M., 2000, ‘Pilfering the public: The problem of land grabbing in contem- porary Kenya’, Africa Today, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 7-26.
- Lefebvre, H., 1996, The right to the city, writings on cities, E. Kofman and E. Lebas, tr., Oxford: Blackwell.
- Marcuse, P., 2009, ‘From critical urban theory to the right to the city’, City, Vol. 13, No. 2-3, pp. 185-197.
- Mattila, H., 2005, ‘Aesthetic justice and collaborative urban planning’, In: D. Wastl-Walter, L. Staeheli, L. Dowler, (eds) Rights to the City, International Geographical Union, Home of Geography Publication Series Volume III, Rome: Società Geografica Italiana, 33–45.
- Kimani, Gachigua & Kariuki: Kenya's 2010 Constitution and the Right of Hawkers 139
- Mayer, M., 2012, ‘The “right to the city” in urban social movements’, in N. Bren- ner, M. Mayer and P. Marcuse, eds, Cities for people, not for profit, New York: Routledge, pp. 75-97.
- McCann, E., 2005, ‘Urban citizenship, public participation, and a critical geography of architecture’, in D. Wastl-Walter, L. Staeheli. and L. Dowler, eds., Rights to the city, International Geographical Union, Home of Geography Publication Series, Rome: Societa Geografica Italiana, Vol. 3, pp. 25-32. Mitchell, D., 2003, The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space, New York: Guilford Press.
- Mitchell, D. and Heynen, N., 2009, ‘The geography of survival and the right to the city: Speculations on surveillance, legal innovation, and the criminalisation of intervention’, Urban Geography, Vol. 30, No. 6, pp. 611-632.
- Mitullah, W., 1991, ‘Hawking as a survival strategy in the urban poor in Nairobi: The case of women’, Environment and Urbanisation, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 13-22.
- Morange, M., 2015, ‘Street trade, neoliberalisation and the control of space: Nai- robi’s Central Business District in the era of entrepreneurial urbanism’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol.
- , No. 2, pp. 247-269.
- Nairobi City County (NCC), 2014, ‘The Project on Integrated Urban Development Master Plan for the City of Nairobi in the Republic of Kenya’, Nairobi: Nairobi City County.
- Omoegun, A., 2015, ‘Street trader displacements and the relevance of the right to the city concept in a rapidly urbanising African city: Lagos, Nigeria’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Cardiff University.
- Purcell, M., 2002, ‘Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant’, Geo Journal, Vol. 58. No. 2-3, pp. 99-108.
- Racaud, S., Kago, J. and Owuor, S., 2018, ‘Introduction: Contested street: Informal street vending and its contradictions’, Articulo—Journal of Urban Research, Vol. 17-18. Available online at http://journals.openedition.org/articulo/3719.
- Republic of Kenya, 2010, The Constitution of Kenya, 2010, Government Printer: Nairobi. Republic of Kenya, 2012, County Governments Act, 2012, Government Printer: Nairobi.Scott, J., 1985, Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Skinner, C., 2017, ‘Law and litigation in street trader livelihoods: Durban, South Africa’, in A. Brown, ed., Rebel streets and the informal economy: Street trade and the law, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 125-142.
- Slavnic, Z., 2009, ‘Informalisation and political economy of restructuring’, Migración y Desarrollo, No. 13, pp. 5-24.
- Slavnic, Z., 2011, ‘Struggle for survival in the deregulated market: Re-commodi- fication and informalisation of the taxi sector in Stockholm’, Forum for Social Economics, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 233-251.
- Slavnic, Z., 2016, ‘The informal economy and the state’, in S. Routh, and V. Borghi, eds, Workers and the global informal economy: Interdisciplinary perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 67-82.
- Africa Development, Volume XLVI, No. 1, 2021
- Swider, S., 2015, ‘Reshaping China’s urban citizenship: Street vendors, Chengguan and struggles over the right to the city’, Critical Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 4-5,pp. 701-716.
- Thornton, D., 2000, ‘Political attitudes and participation of informal and formal sector workers in Mexico’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 33, No. 10, pp. 1279-1309.
- Wanyama, F., 2010, ‘Voting without institutionalized political parties: Primaries, manifestos, and the 2007 general elections in Kenya’, in K. Kanyinga and D. Okello, eds, Tensions and reversals in democratic transitions: The Kenya 2007 general elections, Nairobi: Society for International Development and University of Nairobi, pp. 61-100.
- Watts, B. and Fitzpatrick, S., 2017, ‘Rights-based approaches and social justice’, in A. Brown, ed., Rebel streets and the informal economy: Street trade and the law, London and New York: Routledge.
References
Attoh, K.A., 2011, ‘What kind of right is the right to the city?’ Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp. 669-685.
Bassett, E.M., 2016, ‘Urban governance in a devolved Kenya’, in C. Silva, ed., Gov- erning Urban Africa, London: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Bocquier, P., Otieno, A., Khasakhala, A. and Owuor, S., 2009, Urban integration in Africa: A social-demographic survey of Nairobi, Dakar: CODESRIA.
Brown, A., 2010, October, ‘The “right to the city”, From Paris 1968 to Rio 2010’, in Ponencia presentada en la 11th N-AERUS Conference.
Brown, A., 2017, ‘Legal paradigms and the informal economy: Pluralism, empow- erment, rights or governance?’, in A. Brown, ed., rebel streets and the informal economy: Street trade and the law, London and New York: Routledge.
Charton-Bigot and Rodrigues-Torres, ed., 2010, Nairobi today. the paradox of a fragmented city, Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers.
Cheeseman, N., Lynch, G. and Willis, J., 2016, ‘Decentralisation in Kenya: The gov- ernance of governors’, Journal of Modern Africa Studies, Vol. 54, No.1, pp. 1-35.
De Soto, H., 1989, The other path, tr. by J. Abbort, New York: Harper and Row. Forkuor, J., Akuoko, K. and Yeboah, E., 2017, ‘Negotiation and management strat-egies of street vendors’, in Developing countries: A narrative review, New York: SAGE Publications.
Africa Development, Volume XLVI, No. 1, 2021
Gachigua, S.G., 2016, ‘Legislating for a de jure one-party state in 1982 and “party hopping” in 2012: Reconstructing elite discourse on political parties in Kenya’, in D.O. Orwonjo, O. Oketch and A.H. Tunde, eds, Political discourse in emergent, fragile, and failed democracies, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 298-317.
Gibson, K., 2005, ‘11,000 vacant lots, why take our garden plots? Community garden preservation strategies in New York City’s gentrified Lower East Side’, in Rights to the City, Vol. 3, pp. 353-366.
Government of Kenya (GOK), 2008, Nairobi Metro 2030: A world class African metropolis, Nairobi: Government Printer.
Hart, K., 1973, ‘Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 61-89.
Hart, K., 1985, ‘The informal economy’, Cambridge Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 2,pp. 54-58.
Harvey, D., 2008, ‘The right to the city’, New Left Review, Vol. 53, pp. 23-40. Herrera, J., Kuépié, M., Nordman, C. J., Oudin, X. and Roubaud, F., 2012, ‘In-formal sector and informal employment: Overview of data for 11 cities in 10 developing countries’, Women in informal employment: Globalising and organising working s, Cambridge, MA.
International Labour Organization (ILO), 2013, Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture, 2nd ed., Geneva: International Labour Organization (ILO). Available online at http://www.ilo.org/stat/Publications/WCMS_234413/ lang--en/index.htm). Accessed January 2020.
Joshi K., 2018, ‘Conditional’ citizens? Hawkers in the streets (and the courts) of contemporary India, Articulo —Journal of Urban Research, Vol. 17–18. Available online at https://doi.org/10.4000/articulo.3383.
Kamunyori, S.W., 2007, ‘A growing space for dialogue: the case of street vending in Nairobi’s Central Business District’, unpublished PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Karuga, G. ed., 1993, Actions towards a better Nairobi: Report and recommendations of the Nairobi City Convention: ‘The Nairobi we want’, City Hall, July 27-9.
Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), 2016, Micro, small and medium estab- lishment (MSME) survey: Basic report, Nairobi: Government Printer.
Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), 2019, Gross product report, Nairobi: Government Printer.
Klopp, J. M., 2000, ‘Pilfering the public: The problem of land grabbing in contem- porary Kenya’, Africa Today, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 7-26.
Lefebvre, H., 1996, The right to the city, writings on cities, E. Kofman and E. Lebas, tr., Oxford: Blackwell.
Marcuse, P., 2009, ‘From critical urban theory to the right to the city’, City, Vol. 13, No. 2-3, pp. 185-197.
Mattila, H., 2005, ‘Aesthetic justice and collaborative urban planning’, In: D. Wastl-Walter, L. Staeheli, L. Dowler, (eds) Rights to the City, International Geographical Union, Home of Geography Publication Series Volume III, Rome: Società Geografica Italiana, 33–45.
Kimani, Gachigua & Kariuki: Kenya's 2010 Constitution and the Right of Hawkers 139
Mayer, M., 2012, ‘The “right to the city” in urban social movements’, in N. Bren- ner, M. Mayer and P. Marcuse, eds, Cities for people, not for profit, New York: Routledge, pp. 75-97.
McCann, E., 2005, ‘Urban citizenship, public participation, and a critical geography of architecture’, in D. Wastl-Walter, L. Staeheli. and L. Dowler, eds., Rights to the city, International Geographical Union, Home of Geography Publication Series, Rome: Societa Geografica Italiana, Vol. 3, pp. 25-32. Mitchell, D., 2003, The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space, New York: Guilford Press.
Mitchell, D. and Heynen, N., 2009, ‘The geography of survival and the right to the city: Speculations on surveillance, legal innovation, and the criminalisation of intervention’, Urban Geography, Vol. 30, No. 6, pp. 611-632.
Mitullah, W., 1991, ‘Hawking as a survival strategy in the urban poor in Nairobi: The case of women’, Environment and Urbanisation, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 13-22.
Morange, M., 2015, ‘Street trade, neoliberalisation and the control of space: Nai- robi’s Central Business District in the era of entrepreneurial urbanism’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol.
, No. 2, pp. 247-269.
Nairobi City County (NCC), 2014, ‘The Project on Integrated Urban Development Master Plan for the City of Nairobi in the Republic of Kenya’, Nairobi: Nairobi City County.
Omoegun, A., 2015, ‘Street trader displacements and the relevance of the right to the city concept in a rapidly urbanising African city: Lagos, Nigeria’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Cardiff University.
Purcell, M., 2002, ‘Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant’, Geo Journal, Vol. 58. No. 2-3, pp. 99-108.
Racaud, S., Kago, J. and Owuor, S., 2018, ‘Introduction: Contested street: Informal street vending and its contradictions’, Articulo—Journal of Urban Research, Vol. 17-18. Available online at http://journals.openedition.org/articulo/3719.
Republic of Kenya, 2010, The Constitution of Kenya, 2010, Government Printer: Nairobi. Republic of Kenya, 2012, County Governments Act, 2012, Government Printer: Nairobi.Scott, J., 1985, Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Skinner, C., 2017, ‘Law and litigation in street trader livelihoods: Durban, South Africa’, in A. Brown, ed., Rebel streets and the informal economy: Street trade and the law, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 125-142.
Slavnic, Z., 2009, ‘Informalisation and political economy of restructuring’, Migración y Desarrollo, No. 13, pp. 5-24.
Slavnic, Z., 2011, ‘Struggle for survival in the deregulated market: Re-commodi- fication and informalisation of the taxi sector in Stockholm’, Forum for Social Economics, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 233-251.
Slavnic, Z., 2016, ‘The informal economy and the state’, in S. Routh, and V. Borghi, eds, Workers and the global informal economy: Interdisciplinary perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 67-82.
Africa Development, Volume XLVI, No. 1, 2021
Swider, S., 2015, ‘Reshaping China’s urban citizenship: Street vendors, Chengguan and struggles over the right to the city’, Critical Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 4-5,pp. 701-716.
Thornton, D., 2000, ‘Political attitudes and participation of informal and formal sector workers in Mexico’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 33, No. 10, pp. 1279-1309.
Wanyama, F., 2010, ‘Voting without institutionalized political parties: Primaries, manifestos, and the 2007 general elections in Kenya’, in K. Kanyinga and D. Okello, eds, Tensions and reversals in democratic transitions: The Kenya 2007 general elections, Nairobi: Society for International Development and University of Nairobi, pp. 61-100.
Watts, B. and Fitzpatrick, S., 2017, ‘Rights-based approaches and social justice’, in A. Brown, ed., Rebel streets and the informal economy: Street trade and the law, London and New York: Routledge.