Poor air quality that hangs over us in Nairobi

On a bright sunny day when you make forays into some Nairobi estates, be sure to develop an irritated nose and eyes akin when one has a cold. It is always a silent reminder of the suspended dust particles that we breathe in on daily basis. At the time of writing this article, there is already voluminous peer reviewed literature that points to the folly of poor urban planning in Nairobi which is just but a time bomb. Many urban spans in Nairobi’s Eastlands are wide stretches of concrete jungle with scanty vegetation.

You would probably think you’re in some desert somewhere in the Middle East when you move into some of these estates. Below the competing apartment blocks, broken sewer lines spew human waste on bare surfaces where you will find human trails, traversing in between the murky flow of grey content that the sewer lines ‘belch’ to the surface. During dry weather, the fine particles of human waste and other garbage get aloft and human beings and animals breathe it in. Of course, with naked eyes you can’t see it. Perhaps when you stay close to a road or an open field in such estates, dusts will always find its way into your house, ‘perching on your electronics and other surfaces in the house. Cumulative effects of this would always give your items a new hue altogether.

Are there any urban climatologists in Nairobi and other urban areas in Kenya? I don’t think so. For a fact, there is no Kenyan university that offers any course to do with urban climatology, so we can’t have such professionals within our midst. Perhaps this is the reason why large stretches of Nairobi’s Eastlands do not have a single tree growing in between those jungles of concrete. It is also not uncommon to find car washes stationed right within residential areas. Oil wastes from the cars add to the mix of air and soil pollutants within such areas where they are sited.

Nairobi is growing at a terrific pace; no wonder real estate is one of the most lucrative business ventures for those that have the money to put into the industry. Many thousands continue to migrate from their rural homes into urban areas with Nairobi receiving the highest number of rural-urban migrants. These people are coming to the city to look for greener pastures and other social amenities that Nairobi offers. As a result, we are having millions of people trying to eke a living through any means possible. The problem of high population and poverty is that they are some of the social factors that have challenged ‘green’ development in Nairobi as a city and a capital of Kenya. It is essentially very hard for urban planners to demarcate green spaces in many Nairobi’s estates especially in highly congested areas like Nairobi’s Eastlands.

In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that up to 0.6 million deaths in African continent resulted directly from indoor air pollution. Could we get worried from such a huge number of deaths? Or do we just need to go on with the ‘business as usual’ formula of developing at the expense of human health. Dirty air causes a whole lot of diseases including exposing people to higher risks of cancers.