With its biggest ever budget, Nairobi is dirtier than ever before

What you need to know:

  • The mood is that of people who are angry and melancholy: such citizens are nonchalant and get irritated easily.
  • Governor Kidero in a manner of speaking talks about how his government is intent on reclaiming the “green city in the sun”.
  • The former city Town Clerk understood the logic of the Broken Windows. He mobilised the city’s workforce to clean up the city.

Recently, I was catching up with an investment banker friend who had just returned from a business trip to Kigali, Rwanda. “What is wrong with Nairobi”, he asked me.

“Why?” I asked back.

Listen to this:  “As I was being driven on the main thoroughfare of Kigali, my cab driver happened to ask me where I come from. I told him Nairobi.

“‘Oh, you’re from Nairobi? That dirty, filthy, garbage-laden city teaming with vermin-infested- glue-sniffing boys and girls. What is wrong with Nairobi? Asked the driver.’”

Apparently, the cab driver had visited Nairobi sometime early in 2016 and could not believe it is the same city he had visited a couple of years back in 2007. To the cab driver, the city’s standards had slumped to some nth grade.

What is wrong with Nairobi? Believe it or not, that is the question every sane Nairobian is asking himself or herself today. Everything is wrong with Nairobi.

The state of its current neglect has reduced Nairobians to the attitude of “I don’t give a hoot anymore”.

The mood is that of people who are angry and melancholy: such citizens are nonchalant and get irritated easily. Nairobians’ tone has become cynical and distrustful.

The city is suffering from the “Broken Windows” theory. The theory goes something like this. If you neglect to fix a broken window, passers-by will think…uhmmm…no one cares and therefore, possibly no one is in control. If more windows get broken — which is bound to happen — a sense of anarchy will slowly crawl in.

This anarchy will spread from the building onto the streets that the building faces. The obvious message being relayed here will be: anything goes.

The “Broken Windows” theory — the brainchild of two New York criminologists, quoted by Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian-American journalist in his bestselling book The Tipping Point, is akin to the Kiswahili saying: usipoziba ufa, utajenga ukuta, translated to mean "If you do not repair a crack in the wall, you will end up building a whole new wall".

In a big city like Nairobi, problems such as accumulation of litter, occasional potholes on the roads, unrepaired pavement slabs, unmanned alleys and backstreets are all like broken windows: they are an invitation to public disorder, neglect and more serious crimes.

A single unrepaired window can indeed lead to the rot of an entire city becoming ungovernable, and that is what Nairobi has become.

Let us not kid ourselves: the Nairobi city centre is the mirror by which Nairobians of all shades of life and visitors from all the corners of the world judge the orderliness of the entire city.

It is the face of the city’s urban hinterland. If the central business district is in a mess, chances are good that the city’s neighbourhoods are in an even messier state.

SPIRALLING GARBAGE

Consider the garbage menace: to state that garbage collection has overwhelmed the administration of Governor Evans Kidero is not only to state, but to understate a fact. Mounds of garbage are strewn all over the city’s front streets and backstreets. Garbage has scattered across the city and sored peoples’ eyes while choking their breath.

Downtown Nairobi, the section of Nairobi’s CBD from Tom Mboya Street downwards is a garbage city: factually and figuratively. The county government’s Solid Waste Management department does not even pretend it can manage garbage collection any more

A company that was given a contract to clear garbage in the CBD could not ever handle the mounting piles: they had fewer trucks, even fewer workers and no experience whatsoever on how garbage is collected and managed in cities. 

 It was just a matter of time before the trucks broke down and were not replaced soon enough, if they were replaced at all. The county’s own garbage trucks are even fewer and far between.

Its workers are dispirited and demotivated. You will be lucky to spot any county garbage truck and its labour force grappling with the city’s garbage grime.

Governor Kidero in a manner of speaking talks about how his government is intent on reclaiming the “green city in the sun”. What, instead, he has successfully done, is to make Nairobi a “garbage city in the sun”.    

Perhaps because the city is reeling under the weight of spiralling garbage, which goes uncollected weeks on end, street families, have ferociously returned to colonise the city avenues and its corners.

'VIOLENT RETURN'

The attraction is like that of a moth to light: if the garbage can go weeks on end without being attended to, then the street families will say “They (the authorities) would be less than bothered about our intrusion back to the streets”.

The street children, with their mothers or motherly minders in tow, have therefore poured right onto the middle of the CBD and practically settled on every street corner of the city. They wait upon shoppers at supermarket outlets.

They accost you on Kenyatta Avenue, the city’s premier boulevard that cuts through the middle of the city. They play hide and seek along Mama Ngina Street. Mama Ngina Street was once the cleanest, best-organised human-friendly street in the city.

Street vendors have always been the bane of the city authorities. Vendors and hawkers are not an invention of Nairobi city but are to be found in every major world city. But it is during the reign of Governor Kidero that street vendors and hawkers “attacked” the city with a vengeance never witnessed before.

In the evenings, you have to truly hop, step and jump, as you avoid stepping on their wares, which if you did mistakenly, could, quite literally, start urban warfare. 

Invariably then, the violent return of the street families and the flooding of street vendors onto the CBD have inexorably invited crime and corruption within the city environs.

ONE HUGE MATATU TERMINUS

In January, 2014, Governor Kidero tasked an eight-member committee to come up with recommendations on how to decongest the city of traffic. The Transport and Urban Decongestion committee, chaired by Prof Marion Mutugi, returned its verdict on October 2014.

One of its main recommendations was to remove all matatu termini from the city centre. Two years after that recommendation, one is not sure whether the committee argued for or against matatus operating from the CBD. The city has been turned into one huge matatu terminus.

The result is, matatus have clogged the streets and jammed avenues. Personal vehicles have ceased using some city roads. Two major streets, Tom Mboya and Ronald Ngala, quickly come to mind.

Come evening and on these two roads, it is bedlam revisited. So bad are the traffic snarl-ups in the city that in 2011, International Business Machines Corp did a (pain) survey and found that Nairobi was the fourth most congested city in the world. That was five years ago:

Has the city’s traffic decreased or worsened? Your guess is as good as mine. According to the national government’s statistics, traffic jams costs, in productive man hours, Sh50 million a day. Nairobi for your information accounts for two thirds of Kenya’s total economic output.

SPECTACULARLY FAILED

Human beings are naturally a nostalgic lot. They like to take refuge in memories that remind them of the old good times. Is it any wonder that many Nairobians today fondly remember the tenure of administrator town clerk John Gakuo?

How did Mr Gakuo, with only a fraction of Kidero’s annual budget that runs into billions of shillings, manage to keep the city orderly and tidy?

The former city Town Clerk understood the logic of the Broken Windows. He mobilised the city’s workforce to clean up the city. During Gakuo’s short tenure, garbage in the city centre was anathema.

Street families had been successfully banished. Street vendors and hawkers operated in the city at their own peril.

Matatus in the city were largely only seen in the city when they dropping and picking passengers, and only in designated bus stops.

The city was clean and orderly and shorn of unnecessary traffic jams.

Nothing succeeds like success, and  Evans Kidero has spectacularly failed. As the office of the governor tries to fend off criticisms and obvious disenchantment from Nairobians, it has increasingly turned to futuristic posturing: “We intend to do this and that. This and that plan is at an advanced stage….” The crux of the matter is that the story about strategic plans and futuristic works all sounds like fairy tales. What of now? Infinix, a mobile phone brand name has a slogan: “The future is now.”

What is wrong with Nairobi? The city has become one huge dysfunctional urban space — in short — a snafu.

Dauti Kahura is a senior writer for 'The Elephant', a Nairobi-based publication. Twitter: @KahuraDauti