Striving for a healthy Nairobi Park is about examining our national values

My love affair with the Nairobi National Park began when I was a boy, mostly as a result of family outings to the park on random weekends.

I remember watching in complete awe giraffes, zebras, rhinos, cheetahs and lions roaming the plains. The world felt perfect, orderly, tranquil and inspiring.
My mother recently disclosed to me that whenever I was restless, she would sit me in front of the TV with a wildlife documentary on.

This would calm me down as I would be transfixed by the unfolding events, something that eventually led me into a calling as an environmentalist.

That initial interest in conservation was framed against the diversity and abundance of Africa’s magnificent beasts and our beautiful land?

Over the years, however, the impetus to conserve the park has evolved into something larger than just that of preserving our wildlife. Nairobi is no longer the sleepy capital.

It is a bustling, rapidly growing city facing the challenges that urbanisation has brought to many other cities of the world, challenges exacerbated in the absence of proper urban planning and vision for the city.

ESCAPE THE MADNESS

Nairobi National Park and some of the few other parks and forests in the city provide the only real alternative for residents to escape the madness of city life and the never-ending rat race.

But the park also serves us with vital ecosystem goods and services. A rapidly growing and polluted city does need “lungs” to provide clean air, a filtration system for clean water, and a biological system for the insects that pollinate and support our peri-urban farms and green spaces.

Without these parks and forests, our only options for social activities would be restaurants, bars and places of worship.

The desire for a healthy Nairobi National Park is also a question of law. Recent proposals by the government to extract parcels of park land for the Southern Bypass and the Standard Gauge Railway have been vociferously opposed by conservationists.

As per the Constitution of Kenya 2010 and the relevant land laws, national parks are classified as public land and are, therefore, owned by the citizens.

Other government ministries, institutions and parastatals simply to do not have the legal mandate to trade and exchange such land as if they were its owners.

But this is precisely what they seem to be doing — signing off land to one another, compensating each other (instead of the Kenyan public) for land acquired for government projects, etc.

They also frequently attempt to bypass legal requirements for licences (including provisions for adequate public consultation), flout licence conditions in the cases where they have such licences, and ignore the fact the only an Act of Parliament can allow for the degazettement of national park land.

Questions about the park are also questions about development. Are we still obsessed about notions of development that revolve around “taming the bush”?

Does that development only occur when we clear what is natural and replace it with something “economically productive”?  Can we have both a healthy park and efficient transport infrastructure, instead of choosing one over the other?

FAVOUR PRIVATISATION

Our current governance and economic development models favour privatisation of resources and valuation of goods and services on purely economic terms.

Using the examples of the privatisation of the railway (the concessionary agreement with the Rift Valley Railways Consortium), and water supply and “public transport” within the city, such policies and models result not just in inefficient systems at high cost, but the private gain of profits generated using investment of public funds.

Are we well into a phase where wildlife habitats and landscapes are the dispersal areas for development?

A healthy Nairobi National Park is not just about conservation. It is about a city that is worth working, living and playing in, about how we as a people understand and abide by the rule of law, about how we develop, and about how we prosper.

It is about our hopes, desires and vision for the city. Striving for a healthy Nairobi National Park is about examining our attitudes and our values as a nation.

Akshay Vishwanath, an environmentalist, is on the board of the Friends of Nairobi National Park (FoNNaP) and works with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). These are however, personal views.