Private developers, greedy officials to blame for flood crisis

It is not a coincidence that in every major town in Kenya, the upmarket area is to be found in an estate known as Milimani (up the hills).

The early settlers of Nairobi and other big settlements, recognising that the land on which they built towns had numerous temporary rivers, understood the potential danger of flooding and, therefore, selected the highest points for themselves, building residential houses for administrators and the wealthy colonial settlers in those areas.

The striking thing about the recent floods enveloping the city is that upmarket areas of the city have not been spared.

One of the pictures that has circulated on social media showed waist-deep storm waters lapping around the gates of State House (commonly known in the political literature of the early days as “the house on the hill”).

Some have blamed the crisis on the tendency of Kenyans to dispose of plastic waste everywhere. That is undoubtedly a bad habit but it can’t be the primary one because it is not new.

The more likely problem, especially in the way that the floods have touched every single corner of the city including areas which have not known major flooding for decades, is the decision to allow developers to put up apartments and high-rise buildings in every space, including riparian reserves, which has blocked the path of many temporary rivers.

We can’t say we were not warned. In her last years, the Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai spent her time in a long, loud and largely lonely protest against the problem of encroachment of forests and wetlands by deep pocketed developers.

She was chased away by the police when she and a small group of activists protested that Nakumatt Ukay and a nearby temple were built right atop the path of a river and that the whole area around the Westgate Mall should be a green park with the river section left alone.

Prof Maathai similarly blew the whistle over another development in the Kibarage Valley along Lower Kabete Road, which was being put up right on the riparian land area set aside to allow Mathare River to cut through.

She was basically dismissed and the irony is that officialdom, including bigwigs at the Lands ministry and the city council, often fell on the side of the developers.

In the 1990s, Wangari Maathai was greeted with scorn when she fought a bitter fight to spare Uhuru Park from the construction of a 62-storey concrete monstrosity complete with a parking bay for 2,000 vehicles which was to come with a giant Moi statue erected outside it.

BOWED TO INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE

When the government bowed to international pressure and scrapped the plan, President Moi hit out at opponents of the development as people with “insects in their heads” led by a “wayward woman”.

The environmentalist’s crusade preserved one of the few green spaces in the capital today which serves thousands of families every weekend.

Prof Maathai was less successful in her more recent battles where she suffered the fate of Cassandra, the lady from Greek mythology who was said to have been given the gift of prophecy but who endured under a curse meaning nobody would heed her warnings.

Sample these newspaper headlines in recent years: “Building marked for pull down still going up” (The Star, January 29, 2016, referring to a large commercial building under construction on a riparian reserve along Mbagathi Road). “Alarm over city housing project on wetland” (Nairobi News, August 6, 2015, about the Kibarage Valley project). Lands Commissioner Zablon Mabea rules Nakumatt Ukay not on riparian land (Daily Nation, March 3, 2011)
Nairobi is reaping the bitter fruits of the fact those at the Lands ministry and in the Nairobi county administration have found the money advanced by private developers too tempting to resist and sacrificed the public good in the process.

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Every time the rains start falling these days, one is advised to be as far away from the Ojijo Road/Museum Hill junction as possible because the area has become a flooding hotspot.

Instead of issuing press statements from the comfort of his office, Governor Evans Kidero should go to the ground and realise his office is squarely to blame.
Around a year ago, someone won a tender to “rehabilitate the Ojijo Road walkway.”

They turned up, put up a beautiful billboard outlining the work they would do, dug up both sides of the road the simply disappeared.

In the process, large mounds of soil were dumped in the drainage system by the side of the road and the walkways were blocked on both sides.
Floods are not an act of God. Very often, they are just the fruits of incompetence and greed.

[email protected] @mutigam