We always had cure for city’s traffic mess, it just requires implementation

On Monday, December 3, Nairobi woke up to transport chaos as the city administration enforced a controversial ban on public service vehicles entering the central business district (CBD).

For most of the day, the city was in disarray. The ban, though well intentioned, was poorly executed. The designated terminuses could not contain all the vehicles, there was no planning and no contingency measures in place. That continued late into the night with motorists and passengers stuck in traffic as late as 11pm.

The cost of this reckless experimentalist attempt at policy by Governor Mike Sonko, who prefers to rule by fiat, stacked up in millions. That night, he rescinded the decision in a video post on social media.

MISMANAGEMENT

Nairobi was initially built for just 500,000 people. Today, the city has four million people by night and six million by day. Its infrastructure is decaying, support utilities overstretched and years of mismanagement have turned the “Green City in the Sun” into a concrete jungle. The city is in dire need of a regeneration. Subsequent administrations at City Hall have worked on that through the City Planning Department and, out of the effort, in 2013-2016 the Nairobi Integrated Urban Plan (Niuplan) was developed for the next 15 years.

Before this blueprint the Nairobi Metropolitan Plan had been done in 1973, to run until 2000. Between 2000 and 2016, the city had no integrated plan but made use of sectoral plans and the 1979 Zonal Areas Policy.

POPULISM

In 2013, the City County of Nairobi, in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica), commenced the development of a new city plan, 40 years after the last one. That cost the Japanese a whopping Sh300 million, excluding the technical assistance and capacity building of the county’s staff, and the county government Sh100 million.

Niuplan was completed in 2014. It was then subjected to an elaborate public participation session before being approved and adopted after the county assembly passed it as Sessional Paper Number 2 of 2016.

Yet, bar for a few cherry-picked bits, it has been shelved and the political class resorted to populist tantrums. Whereas, it has become a norm for our politicians to run for office with promises cobbled up as manifestos, most of the time un-researched voodoo plans, a city of Nairobi’s magnitude can’t be run on such sorcery.

DUPLICATION

Niuplan meticulously addresses all the city’s spheres summed up in six sectors: Environment; land use and human settlement; urban economy; transport; infrastructure; and governance and institutional arrangements.

Under transport, it proposes a three-tier strategy to help solve Nairobi’s perennial woes — bus rapid transport (BRT), light rail transport and non-motorised transport (NMT). To decongest the city, Governor Sonko should simply implement Niuplan.

The problem, however, is that even the national government frequently joins the fray in the city’s mismanagement through unnecessary complications such as coming up with the Nairobi Metropolitan Transport Authority (NaMaTa) and a multi-sectoral group referred to as the Nairobi Regeneration Team. Such outfits work at cross-purposes with the city county government, causing unnecessary competition, duplication and bureaucracy.

Mr Maliba is the strategic partnerships and policy dialogues manager at Emerging Leaders Foundation. [email protected], @ArnoldMaliba