The City Hall two-step

This is my two-cents' worth on the collapsing residential and commercial buildings in Nairobi. The rot began with the Nairobi City Commission back in the 1980s. It is the City Commission that was responsible for the mess that we find ourselves in. The City Council that it replaced had proven to be a mess, a mess that was the responsibility of the foolish voters who put it in power. The Commission went out of its way to look out for the interests of the Commissioners and not that of the residents of the City of Nairobi, which used to be known as the Green City in the Sun. Back then, the trash was collected on time, the streets were swept, the street lights shone, and planning permission was par for the course for any building that came up in Nairobi.

The City Commission was appointed and all of a sudden it was de rigueur for housing contractors to cut corners and for planning permission to be obtained at a fee, based on the size of the wallet and not on the quality of the structural plans. The collapse of Sunbeam Supermarket along Tom Mboya Street was a harbinger of the doom that was to befall the residents of the City and Nairobi was never the same again. When the Council started issuing Letters of Allocation to well-connected individuals, eschewing the ordinary planning procedures, the haste with which the new 'investors' erected patently unsafe buildings left one in awe at the massive level of institutional myopia that the Council was suffering from. In their haste to 'recoup their investments', the new building contractors were no longer interested in safety, but more on how many zeros they could add to their telephone-number bank accounts in the shortest possible time. At the same time, the level of corruption in City Hall rose with the increase in the City's temperature and the loss of its green areas. It became OK for one to bribe his way to a permit for an off-plan shop, school, dispensary or petrol station and as a result, you are today hard-pressed to find a single open space in the City that has not been earmarked for some bland high-rise block of flats. Today, the number of buildings that may collapse is more than the mind can comprehend, and it is only a matter of time before their structural integrity is at an end and they come down like houses of cards.

Of course, Mr Philip Kisia, the Town Clerk, will lay the blame on the Judiciary, forgetting that the Judiciary, in its new-found judicial independence, will only intervene when it is clear that legal rights are at stake. If Mr Kisia's Legal Department is unable to persuade the courts of the City's rights, he has no one to blame but himself, and the dead and dying have no one to blame but Mr Kisia and his mandarins. Mr Kisia, and his predecessor Mr John Gakuo, managed to persuade the residents of Nairobi that they were doing their best to end the culture of graft at City Hall. But, the records show that their anti-graft campaigns have not borne much fruit. Because of graft, the payment of rates has not kept pace with the unlicensed operations that take place in the City annually. Indeed, reliable sources opine that the City Fathers are unaware of exactly how many bank accounts the City Council operates or how much these accounts hold. As a result, the City has been unable to hire enough Inspectors to keep an eye on the explosion of construction that is taking place, especially the construction that follows none of the City's rules or obeys the edicts of engineering. Therefore, it should surprise no one that buildings are constructed on land of dubious ownership, using materials of dubious quality, at speeds that raise more questions than answers, and using techniques that suggest that engineers are conspicuous by their absence in the buildings' planning or supervision. The results have been death and suffering.

When the Minister for Local Government suggests that the government together with City Hall will collaborate to identify all such buildings, and knock them down, he is merely treating the symptoms of the cancer rather than surgically removing the tumour. If they do nothing to sort out how City Hall operates, this is a problem that will bedevil the residents of Nairobi for generations. Twenty years from now, when another wave of collapses engulfs our fair City, we will be left suggesting the same solutions as we are today.