Formerly known as Enkare Nairobi

Despite being the birth place of Wangari Maathai, of being the current host of the UNEP, we treat our natural resources in the country the way public officials treat our hard earned money. With contempt, and as a never ending ATM. Despite being perennially squeezed for water as a water scarce country, we still mismanage the fragile ecosystems and water bodies we currently have with politicians engaging in an infantile populist chicken/ egg argument over whether forests bring rain, or rain brings forests (correct answer: forests bring rain).

The notion that we are but custodians of this land- and that we hold it in trust for future generations is a central tenet of what we say we stand for as a country. It’s enshrined in the Constitution, and with responsible planetary stewardship a corner stone of most religious belief systems.  Unfortunately, this principle didn’t survive first contact with the venal kleptocracy that is Kenya. Our rivers, rhinos, forests, elephants, beaches, sand, coral ecosystems are all under siege.

We have a penchant for constraining things that were always meant to be free. But nature has a habit of cracking down on those who thwart her. She’s resilient- “able to absorb and accommodate future events in whatever unexpected form they may take." But she’s not infinitely forgiving. She scoffs at tenderpreneur’s elastic compromises, and in the past, we’ve seen her fight back at the people who deigned to constrain her.  In a sense, nature has been fighting back as NEMA and the rest twiddled their thumbs. The current clearing of riparian land is a belated move to rectify sins of omission and commission that have been piling up over the years. While NEMA is late to the show, nature has been working on clearing this up herself and on reclaiming what was never ours to build on. We watched as developers erected buildings and homes on riparian land and in typical “shauri yako” fashion, built culverts designed to shepherding the river into other peoples’ property! Pity. 

Beyond the multiple damming and diversion of the river that’s been happening and causing flooding, the encroachment of riparian reserve has been disastrous to the urban ecology of Nairobi. The riparian reserve is more than an aesthetic requirement. Riparian zones carry out soil nitrification amongst other things,  and off balance leads to eutrophication and deoxygenation of the riverine system.  A whiff of the Kirichwa River provides ample proof that all’s not right in the Nairobi river system. Our rivers are full of trash and debris and some- like the Ngong River are nothing more than open sewers. It’s not entirely surprising because where a government connects less than half the resident households with sewer systems, waste has to go somewhere with the resultant rivers being nothing more than fetid and murky cesspools brimming with plastic bags even months after the plastic ban.

The Caveat Emptorness of it all:

Living in Kenya sometimes feels like being in the Thunderdome in Mad Max.  The utter lack of safeguards for citizens shows us that in almost all interactions, the citizen is on her own. While I applaud the demolition of property that was wilfully and deliberately built on riparain land by those who knew it was public land and perverted the system to do so, it's utterly deplorable that *some* innocent Kenyans who bought land in good faith have now been left holding the bag.  The news clip of homeowners in Green Park in Athi River whose houses were being demolished was gut wrenching. They’ve been left holding mortgages that they still need to pay for over land that was never theirs to own and my heart goes out to them. Meanwhile- the developers who bribed and built their way into this mess are still laughing all the way to the bank. It’s a situation that needs urgent rectification- the demolition of houses should be accompanied by an EACC investigation of how those multiple permits came to be issued. It also behoves NEMA to publicly publish a list of what is public land (which all riparian land is), and to show what actions have been taken against employees who participated in the creation of this unholy mess.  

This information asymmetry in a perennially corrupt environment lends itself to a situation where the innocent are hoodwinked, and the corrupt find safe harbour for their pillage and robbery of public land. It’s an untenable state of affairs. Ultimately, for longer lasting and more just solutions, we need more safeguards and constancy from the Government.