Marking Environment Day while ignoring social injustices hypocritical

Resident participating in tree planting to protect Lumuli Dam in Trans Nzoia County. [Martin Ndiema, Standard]

Last week, Kenya joined the rest of the world in commemorating World Environment Day 2024. It was a prompt for us to confront the realities we face regarding the state of our environment as a nation. Thousands of Kenyans have been rendered homeless by mass and unjust demolitions along riparian reserves. While reclaiming these reserves is essential, the process has been marred by unlawfulness and discrimination. Informal settlers are being displaced, while encroachers from affluent neighbourhoods remain largely untouched. But are they really untouchable?

Despite ongoing demolitions, authorities such as the Water Resources Authority, the National Construction Authority, and the National Environmental Management Authority continue to approve high-impact developments dangerously close to rivers, particularly in Nairobi. This highlights the artificial and reactive nature of our responses to environmental calamities such as flooding. By evicting vulnerable people and leaving the reclaimed land open for opportunistic cartels, we ignore the root causes of flooding-high-impact, beacon-to-beacon developments with walls up to the riverbanks and insufficient drainage systems. These structures exacerbate flooding, condemning downstream inhabitants to repeated seasonal floods, yet they still stand tall.