Nairobi’s Missing Binfrastructure

The date is 30 May 1899. The Indian labourers constructing the railway are commanded by their British officers to put down their tools and take a break. The railway, now on its 327^th mile (526 kilometres) since construction began in Mombasa, has arrived at a swamp. 

The railway will have to go through the swamp before going up into the highlands ahead, to Kikuyu. The colonial administrators look within the East African colony for an official competent enough to deal with this swamp and settle on a British civil servant in Ukambani. His name is John Ainsworth.

In the letter drafting Ainsworth to become the Administrator of Mile 327 (the area now known as Nairobi), he is informed that “the swamp is chock-full of croaking frogs that keep the area busy as they croak in unison, while behind it is a barren, open land, where hippos gnarl at the Nairobi River”.

Ainsworth takes on the challenge and soon arrives at the swampy area, building his house at the top of the hill that’s straight ahead from the railway station, where Station Street (now Moi Avenue) ends, exactly where the Nairobi National Museum now sits. 

To combat the menace that is the swamp, Ainsworth has brought with him Tasmanian blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) seedlings from Machakos, a species that requires a lot of water to grow well. The blue gums are planted along the edges of the swamp. 

Soon enough, not only is the swamp now drained, the blue gums also make the town beautiful. A flurry of activities now come up in the area that was formerly a swamp. Indian merchants construct a whole street full of shops called the Indian Bazaar (now Biashara Street). The British settlers, on the other hand, construct hotels along Station Street, including the Stanley Hotel, built by Mayence Bent in 1902, and the Norfolk Hotel, built by Major Ringer and Aylman Winecurts in 1904.

Next, Ainsworth embarks on constructing boulevards – wide, tree-lined roads such as Sixth Avenue, now Kenyatta Avenue – in the Central Business District. However, Ainsworth is transferred to Naivasha in 1906, before he can finish his project.

The following year, Nairobi replaces Mombasa as the capital of the protectorate and the population rises from 8,000 in 1907 to 24,000 in 1921. This growth causes planning issues, leading colonial officer Eric Dutton to comment, as he passes through Nairobi on his way to Mount Kenya,

“Maybe one day Nairobi will be laid out with tarred roads, with avenues of flowering trees, flanked by noble buildings; with open spaces and stately squares; a cathedral worthy of faith and country; museums and of art; theatres and public offices. And it is fair to say that the Government and the Municipality have already bravely tackled the problem and that a town-plan ambitious enough to turn Nairobi into a thing of beauty has been slowly worked out, and much has already been done. But until that plan has borne fruit, Nairobi must remain what she was then, a slatternly creature, unfit to queen it over so lovely a country.”

Fast-forward to the 21^st Century

The years leading to and after independence aren’t bad either, as Nairobi has developed further, with beautiful squares, parks and playgrounds. The ’90s, however, see a decline in the city’s standards under Mayor John King’ori. It isn’t until 2004, when John Gakuo is appointed Nairobi’s Town Clerk under the Nairobi City Council, that the city is eventually reawakened.

Under Gakuo’s tenure Nairobi regains the tag “the green city in the sun” by which it was referred to in colonial Kenya. Gakuo oversees not only the planting of thousands of trees in the city, but also the proper management of garbage.

With little resources at his disposal, Gakuo oversees the collection of the large mounds of garbage around most parts of the city, and has them disposed of in a scheduled manner. He once said, “If garbage was found in a place that had been cleared of waste, immediate property owners or businesspersons were held responsible and dealt with firmly. With time, they towed the line and became our eyes on the ground. And if my men were to blame, I dealt with them firmly as well.” 

Come devolution

Under the governorships of Evans Kidero, Mike Sonko and Johnson Sakaja, the “green city in the sun” is again a shadow of its former self; waste is dumped anywhere and everywhere, decrepitude has crept in.

City Hall itself, the county’s authority, has been complicit in the littering; in February this year, it dumped garbage at the entrance to Stima Plaza because of an outstanding debt of KSh 4.8 billion that Kenya Power owes City Hall. Now, if the authorities themselves are engaging in such anarchic activities, sembuse the ordinary citizens?

On 22 October, Nairobi City County enacted the Solid Waste Management Act, the purpose of which is to provide a legal framework to guide the handling, packaging, treatment, conditioning, reducing, recycling, reusing, storage and disposal of solid waste to protect the environment.

Clause 36 (2) of the Act states that, “Any person who dumps, causes, or allows waste disposal in any premises, land or any other place not approved for such disposal shall be guilty of an offence.”

Clause 37 (1) adds that “Where an offence is committed under this Act by a body corporate, the body corporate and every director or officer of the corporate who had knowledge of the commission of the offence and who did not exercise due diligence, efficiency and economy to ensure compliance with this Act shall be guilty of the offence.”

The failure to arrest the county officials involved in the dumping of waste at Stima Plaza is an indication of the double standards applied when dealing with those who contravene the Act.

A county’s failure

In 2012, Nithya Ramasamy, an Engineering student in India, conducted a study in her home town using GIS (Geographical Information Systems) to establish the optimal locations and proximal distance of waste bins in urban centres. 

The factors Ramasamy considered in her study included the locations of the existing bins, the area’s road network, the population density, and most importantly, and the distance the average person is willing to walk with waste in their hands before finally feeling uncomfortable and disposing of it in whichever way. At the end of her research, Ramasamy concluded that the optimal proximal distance from one waste bin to the other should be 50 m.

Now, dear reader, what do you think is the distance from one waste bin to the next in downtown Nairobi? Most streets have no waste disposal bins, not even the beautiful boulevard that John Ainsworth built in 1906 that runs from Integrity Centre all the way down to Imenti House. 

The number of bins in the central business district is negligible, and almost all of them have been installed by the occupants of the adjacent buildings, such as the bin outside Rehani House on Koinange Street that was installed by the Housing Finance Corporation, or the bins that were formerly outside KeMU Towers along University Way that were installed by Kenya Methodist University (they no longer exist; I wonder who removed them). 

Again, Clause 16 of the Solid Waste Management Act states, “The county government may directly or indirectly undertake collection of solid waste from the streets and any other public spaces.”

In addition, Clause 18 (1) states that, “The county government shall provide appropriate waste containers for the disposal of solid waste in the public streets and other public places.”

That the county government is unable to follow its own rules is hardly surprising; we live in a state where we beg those in government to respect the laws they enact. 

Why, despite all the outrage, the county government hasn’t installed any waste bins in the CBD is saddening. And just so you know, there exists a County Environment Chief Officer at City Hall whose task includes overseeing proper waste disposal in the city. 

In the United Kingdom, there exists a non-profit local networking community known as the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) that assists local authorities to deliver frontline services. In order to improve operational efficiency in waste management, the organisation keeps an accurate register of the binfrastructure – the waste disposal infrastructure – using a GIS system.      

Maybe our City County could borrow a leaf from APSE and improve their service delivery with regard to waste management. There exist numerous resident associations and planning groups with which the County Council could work hand in hand, putting back the green in the “city in the sun” by replanting the many trees that have been cut down in the recent past.

When the Waswahili said “Usipoziba ufa, utajenga ukuta”, they were definitely sending us a warning that if we’re not careful, our green city in the sun would soon turn brown – and not because of all the construction that’s happening. If Ainsworth and Gakuo could clean up the city, then, definitely, our current leaders should too! This starts by installing more than just one waste bin on every street – one every 50 metres as Nithya Ramasamy advised.