We are living on the dangerous lane

There is only one outcome when man stands in the way of nature. Liquids find their level. That is why it is a display of ignorance to “shake” our vehicles at petrol stations to ‘create’ more fuel space in the tanks.

The winner in the duel always is the two-legged. What happened in Nairobi on Monday and Tuesday nights only served to expose how fast we are losing the war we launched against nature by building on water-ways and any natural drainage and marshland.

Because we live every day as if we are determined to make Nairobi one huge concrete slab, our appetite for quick money sees us steal sewer covers. We not only occasionally break our legs in the resultant gaping holes, these holes now serve as doorways for our solid waste like plastic bags to get in and choke the system.

Apart from choking our rivers by diverting waste into them, we have built right next and above them, and then we comfortably wish each other goodnight, before dozing off in the death chamber. When it happens, we claim God took some of us at the appointed time.

Today, I am not in the mood to apportion blame because the mess is the fruit of our dalliance with death whilst pretending what we learnt in our Science classes does not apply once we leave the classroom. The most painful thing is that this negligence and greed for land is replicated in each of our towns. We only take notice when we get stuck in flood waters for 10 hours, shaking like a leaf because of the cold.

When some of us came to this big city, confused and timid as we were by the dazzle of civilisation, one thing we noticed were streets in the Central Business District where parking of vehicles was prohibited. You see, the older planners set up the city in a way that there were blocks in rectangular parcels ringed by streets.

The streets not only served as service lanes for the fire fighters and ambulances when disaster struck, but they also were fire points. What do I mean? Simple, because they would be free of the petrol-laden vehicles, and given the distance between any two blocs, however strong the winds, fire would be confined to the unlucky block. If there was a fire or any form of disaster, and with our clogged roads now, ask yourself how we would get to safety in Nairobi. Many of us have been in traffic, dead stuck, with an ambulance equally held up. You can imagine how many must have died just because of our mismanagement of the transport system.

Yet that big fool in the car behind you will trail the ambulance once it gets an opening, just to be ahead of you! As Collin Powell cautioned, be careful what you ask for, for you may just get it; by being the exasperated patient being rushed to the life-support facility.

Take the case of Mombasa Road, where the county government and police have the luxury, unless President Uhuru Kenyatta is expected on this stretch, to let a broken-down lorry ‘kill’ one lane for a whole day, as its operators repair broken parts, do engine overhaul or even wait for spares to be bought from Grogan Street. Yet all we need, as I have shared with Governor Evans Kidero before, is a temporary measure like setting up a road-clearance unit at designated points. The cost will of course be passed on to the owners of the trucks.

Unless we treat vehicular and human movement as a matter of life and death, this casualness and cheapening of human life will continue to be with us. This casualness manifests itself in such horrifying ways as letting the poor dwell right next to railway lines in Kibera and Mombasa, or even putting up houses just next to Kenya Pipeline’s underground ducts in Mukuru.

The last time there was a fire tragedy, we responded as if there were no physical markings of where the pipes lay. And of course the lousy Pipeline engineers who triggered the spillage are somewhere probably ‘perfecting’ the art of killing others and still playing innocent.

Take the case of the recent flooding; South C had to be under a blackout, not just because water was getting into homes and levelling up with the electricity sockets and the master’s bedroom and dining table, but Kenya Power’s own sub-station was submerged.

Looking at them, I cannot but respect the science behind the raised and aerated traditional granaries our grandparents built. They were forever assured of no water damage and aflatoxin! But it does not mean we do not know, it is just that we do not care!

Then factor in the way we work hard to make minced meat of ourselves through ingenious ways like illegal power connections buried in the ground or even putting up petrol pumps next to our shops and schools.

Then there are the sewerage lines and rusty water pipes buried parallel to each other in the belly of the city from the 1930s. Both have now been so badly corroded or damaged by the elements in some places, they are literally feeding into each other! And we think pipe water is just clean because of its clear look.

We are a bunch of failed citizenry alongside its leadership at all levels. We shall see change the moment we raise the premium we put on life. Not when our leaders, for example, find corruption kickbacks as the only incentive to push for putting up of new hospitals.

After all, stealing from the dead and the dying is no longer a taboo; that is what those who live next to our black-spots on the highways do for a living.