Zim has Africa’s highest rate of forced evictions

in Zimbabwe received international press attention when over 700,000 people were made homeless during Operation Murambatsvina. However, despite having the highest rate of evictions in Africa, with 53 out of 1000 people being evicted from their homes, Zimbabweans are not alone in being the victims of this destructive government policy.
Over 2 million people have been violently evicted from their homes in Nigeria since 2001 in order to implement a master plan drawn up in 1978 to develop the city of Abuja, and in Kenya over 70,000 people have been evicted from forest areas since 2005.
The practice of forced evictions has been recognised as a violation of human rights by the African Commission and the right to adequate housing is guaranteed under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. However governments in Africa continue to forcibly and violently evict people from their homes without any prior warning and, according to the report, evictions are usually accompanied by other human rights violations such as torture, rape, beatings and killings.
In Zimbabwe, the consequences of Operation Murambatsvina are horrific; an estimated 2.4 million people were affected by the evictions, 300,000 children were forced to leave school, and hundreds of thousands of people had to sleep rough in the streets through the winter, 79% of people lost their sources of income and over 4 million Zimbabweans are now in desperate need of food aid. The government is refusing to allow NGOs into the country to hand out aid to the most needy.
A delegation of four people from different social movements in South Africa visiting Zimbabwe in July of this year found that people are still seriously affected by Murambatsvina. Despite government claims that those made homeless would receive new housing under Operation Garikayi, the delegation found that the houses built constituted only 5% of those destroyed. Reports indicated that they were only being inhabited by those with political connections and some of the hastily constructed houses were so badly built that people are afraid to live in them.
In addition to the suffering caused by evictions within the country, Operation Murambatsvina and other forced eviction campaigns have an international impact as well. According to the International Alliance of Inhabitants (IAI) over a billion people worldwide are threatened with homelessness or bad housing conditions. Objective 11 of the Millennium Development Goals laid out a target of reducing this number by 100 million by 2015, however according to IAI it is more likely to increase by 700 million by 2020.
As Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of Amnesty International’s Africa Programme, points out: “By failing to bring an end to the practice of forced evictions, African leaders are violating their obligations to protect human rights and undermining their expressed commitments to development imperatives such as the Millennium Development Goals and NEPAD.”
The IAI launched a campaign in 2004 to mobilize the international community into doing something about the evictions. However, as pointed out in the report, despite the right to adequate housing being guaranteed under international law, many governments in Africa continue to evict thousands of people every year. – KJW