Pope slams Kenya’s rich and powerful elite

Pope Francis visited a Nairobi slum yesterday, calling such areas “wounds inflicted” by a wealthy and powerful elite and urging Africa’s governments to do more to lift their people up from poverty.

The pope, making his first visit to the continent, has championed the plight of the poor both in public declarations and his own way of life, shunning the institutional perks of the Vatican.

Even before he became Latin America’s first pope in 2013, he was known as the “the slum bishop” because of frequent visits to the shanty towns of Buenos Aires.

Kenya is the first stop on his Africa tour, which also takes him to Uganda and the Central African Republic, a grindingly poor nation riven by Muslim-Christian sectarian conflict.

While calling for religious dialogue – and appealing for steps to address climate change when he visited the UN offices in Nairobi – Francis regularly returned to his concern about inequality and poverty.

On his last day in Kenya, the pope visited Nairobi’s Kangemi district, a neighbourhood of potholed roads, open sewers and shacks, just a few hundred metres from smart apartment blocks and gated residential compounds.

Addressing slum dwellers, charity workers and clergy in St Joseph the Worker Church, the pope spoke of the “dreadful injustice of urban exclusion”. “These are wounds inflicted by minorities who cling to power and wealth, who selfishly squander while a growing majority is forced to flee to abandoned, filthy and run-down peripheries,” he said.

Francis criticised “faceless private developers who hoard areas of land and even attempt to appropriate the playgrounds of your schools” ... for the “god of money”.

He said one of the biggest challenges was a lack of basic amenities. “Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water,” he said, adding no “bureaucratic pretext” should deny a family clean water.

The pope said Africa was not alone in facing what he called a “new colonialism”.

Musonde Kivuva, archbishop of Mombasa, said: “More can be done and should be done in all our slums.”