Green city under water: Why nature's unbearable rage is haunting Nairobi

The Nairobi Expressway has recently been full of fast-flowing water, it could be mistaken for a water canal driving water to some rice paddies near the metropolis. 

When Mukuru kwa Njenga got submerged, those of us who “know” and yet do not live therein wondered aloud “but why do they live too near to the river, they should know that a swollen river must affect them”. 

For a few days we thought no more of the raging and ravaging waters making a way for themselves. When the raging waters visited the once some of city leafy suburbs of Kilimani, Parklands and Kileleshwa over the weekend, even the most skeptical observer could no longer hide under the guise that such things only affect the informal settlements which tend to be too near rivers banks and hence suffer the brunt of swollen rivers. 

Something was amiss, many could see through the thin veil of misinformation, incompetence and lack of preparedness from the Nairobi City County. 

On the other hand, independent city planners say that Nairobi city planning policy reviews have been ignored to the detriment of city dwellers. 

Nairobi was set up at the turn of the 20th century by British colonial authorities as a railroad depot and in 1905, it became the capital of British East Africa. But as the city grew over the years, proper planning, and a review if those plans have become its Achilles heel. 

Successive governments failed to have Nairobi’s development plans updated and apply strict adherence to it. Of course amenities and other infrastructure critical to the success of a city holding more than five million residents have failed to keep up, resulting in an endemic lack of clean water for human use, garbage everywhere, poorly kept roads and storm drains in many places and the invasion of riparian and other wetland areas for human habitation.

The low lying areas of the city running parallel to Mombasa road are affected by the on-going ferocious rains as are the usual areas in many informal settlements that are built to close to the tributaries of Nairobi river and the main river itself. 

There are other areas too that range from Kileleshwa to Kilimani, South C to South B, Lavington to Parklands, it would seem like no locality is spared. 

However, what is common to a majority of the affected suburbs of Nairobi is the infiltration of seemingly haphazard developments which in most cases are substantially much bigger than the previous occupation levels. 

Herein, high rise buildings are seen scaling well over ten floors on the exact footprint initially occupied by single-dweller units. The result is that there is a lot of soil movement to accommodate the humongous buildings which ultimately changes the initial water flow courses established over the years without offering well thought out alternatives for water movement. 

But the saddest part is the inaction by the county government towards ensuring they do their part as more buildings crop up each day. It clears for development facilities that would call for very strict enforcement; all this without following through with supervision, hence the resultant poor execution of the projects which end up affecting other nearby buildings and amenities. 

The storm drains are seldom cleaned, the amount of garbage going unattended within the city estates and the central business district is a story for another day, maintenance of storm drains and their expansion is a long story requiring special funds to be allocated, and when it comes to having a drainage system master plan for the city, that might look like it is out of our league. We might just have seen what happened to Dubai. 

The glittering City of gold went down under a deluge of water last week and somehow they managed, we will also just scape through if rainfall of that magnitude came on us. It might be if interest to not that this was the most rainfall Dubai City ever received since they began recording their rainfall levels in 1949.

Nairobi City has never had a comprehensive review of its physical planning or zoning policy since the 70’s and now that the city is stretching to its limits, the recent pronouncement by the Governor that Nairobi only has room to develop vertically and not horizontally is another attempt at making roadside policy directions without the input of all stakeholders and particularly urban planning experts who are willing and readily available in our country. 

It is never too late for the county government to do what is their responsibility, pick and correctly dispose of the garbage, clean up the storm drains of silt and dirt, build more storm drains with the intention to direct water out of the city to a place where it can be made use of and lastly it would do good to have an emergency contingency plan in case residents find themselves marooned in their homes as witnessed recently. Nairobi City County, the buck stops with you…

Nairobi City County and all other affected counties should know that nature fights back and in a fight with nature, and it wins hands down any day! 

In light of the siege that has been occasioned by the raging waters, some of the messages posted on X platform would probably be very telling on how we, as a city got here. A message MCA Robert Alai alludes to decisions to defy nature by degrading rivers. 

“Rivers in Nairobi were downgraded into streams illegally by those in charge of planning. Now we have many homes built next to rivers so flooded. Walls have collapsed all over. Good people, just listen to common sense. Don’t go against nature. It will fight back. #SaveNairobi,” Alai wrote on X. 

Nairobi, in Maa language means the “place of cool waters,” but has now turned to be the place of raging and ravaging waters, I wonder what the Maa would now call it.