8. Urban congestion: The failure of OM to change people’s urban identity The two proclaimed intentions behind OM were to tidy up the towns by removing structures that did not conform to the law, and to remove the people that lived in these structures, driving them back to rural areas. The intention of the following survey was to conduct our own investigation into these issues: • • • Were the structures demolished in fact “slums”? 82 Has the intention to displace people from urban to rural areas succeeded? What is the basic quality of life on properties affected by demolitions?83 The authors have spent much of the last year following up on some of the 1,400 displaced from the informal settlements of Ngozi Mine and Killarney, who were forcibly kidnapped out of the churches and dumped in remote districts in July 2005.84 By our estimate, between 60% and 75% of those forcibly abandoned in rural areas by the police in July 2005 have made their own way back to the towns.85 We give in-depth histories of some such cases in the following section of this report. As we followed up on this group by travelling a wide cross section of rural areas, it appeared to us that very few of those from the approximately 10,800 Bulawayo back yard structures demolished had in fact relocated to the rural setting – or at least we were not coming across them. Similarly, in Victoria Falls, tens of thousands of residents were displaced by the demolitions, yet we were finding remarkably few who had migrated permanently to rural areas. Reports such as that by Action Aid have indicated that the majority of those displaced had remained in the urban setting.86 We set out to verify this in Bulawayo, and to do our own assessment of the impact of the demolitions on basic quality of life in urban areas. 82 Backyard dwellings by definition are illegal in terms of town by-laws, unless council approved, which most are not. But we were more interested in whether the quality of these dwellings was likely to pose a health or safety risk to those living in them, in a more general sense, and whether they qualified for the UN definition of what constitutes a “slum”. 83 This survey has not examined types of income before and after OM; we have assessed space per person, and the disruption to family units of the current housing arrangements. 84 The taking in of the displaced by the Bulawayo churches and then the forced removal of them from the churches at midnight by armed police was covered in detail in “Crime of Poverty”, October 2005. 85 More than half the previous inhabitants of Killarney and Ngozi Mine are now back there, with 3 or 4 more families arriving weekly in July 2006; authors’ own continuous observations. 86 Action Aid in conjunction with Combined Harare Ratepayers Association, A study on the impact of “Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order” in 26 wards of Harare high density housing areas”, July 2005. 37