By Amos Kareithi
A giant Marabou stork flaps its wings over a mass of vehicles and a strip of barren stones.
Some famished goats and cows bleat and moo as they snuffle through the dust for anything they can eat.
The impatient blaring of car horns adds to the cacophony.
As a traffic police officer mechanically flags his hand to direct the endless wave of traffic, the unimaginable happens.
A matatu, which has been dangerously edging itself in and out of lanes, finally drives over the kerb, onto the carefully arranged rock mosaics, and careens in the opposite direction.
chaotic highway
All the disbelieving officer can do is to shake his head in resignation.
Welcome to the chaos that is Nairobi’s Nyayo Stadium roundabout.
This is what visitors face after a beautiful drive from the airport on Mombasa Road ends at Uhuru Highway, one of the country’s main roads into Vision 2030.
"It is like motorists now have an extra lane," a police officer controlling traffic at the junction says. "Every now and then, they cross the strip dividing the dual carriage way and head the opposite direction. There is nothing I can do."
The metal spikes planted along the strip to prevent this have been liberated by street boys and sold for a song to scrap metal dealers. It has taken less than two weeks for the unholy alliance of street urchins and unruly drivers to scuttle Kenya’s dream of revolutionising the city’s roads.
Left: Mr Timothy Muriuki, chairman of NCBDA (left), Dr Alfred Mutua, Government Spokesman (centre) and Nairobi Metropolitan PS Eng Philip Sika plant grass on JKIA Highway, Embakasi during the launch of the Nairobi Facelift Programme. [PHOTOS: MOSES OMUSULA/STANDARD] |
Town Clerk Philip Kisia hinted this marked a change from "plans" to "planning".
On August 11, Government Spokesman Alfred Mutua shocked the country when he announced well-manicured flowers on the city’s pavements would be uprooted and replaced with stones.
Dr Mutua said he had a blue print for beautifying Nairobi to reclaim its lost glory. Faced with accusations he was using millions to deface the city, Mutua said the use of rock chippings was justified as they were cheaply available and required no water or constant maintenance.
Easier to maintain
"The new phase is aimed at ending this cycle of construction and demolition, "We want to work with what is easy to establish and easier to maintain," Mutua told journalists.
"These materials are cheap and easy to maintain. They do not require a lot of water and offer minimal distractions to motorists and pedestrians," said Mutua. Concrete, ‘ballast’, flowers and trees are to be obtained from Government agencies, while the Ministry of Works will provide equipment and machinery for the work.
Between 2003 and 2006, the City Council has spent about Sh300 million in beautification and other social programmes.
During the launch of the beautification project, Mutua said the initiative would create 5,000 jobs under the Kazi Kwa Vijana programme.
He was photographed in a paid-up advertisement demonstrating the ‘beauty’ of the multicoloured stones — contrasted with flowerbeds he had uprooted. The stone layers, arranged according to colour — in a circular pattern, were meant to help Nairobi recapture its lost glory as "the City in the Sun".
But the glory Mutua had in mind has turned out to be an illusion. The meticulously arranged white stones have lost their allure and are now coated with a thick layer of dust. A fortnight of hard walking by pedestrians and hawkers has kicked about the loose chippings, blurring the designs and covering them in the earth.
"How can you uproot flowers and replace them with stones near a stadium?" declares Peter Njenga, a hawker.
A colleague, who gave his name as Kasim, had more creative ideas for the stones saying: "The Government has unwittingly helped us. When City Council askaris come to arrest us, we will have ready missiles."
Stunted explosions
Next to St Paul’s Chapel along Uhuru Highway, a patch of withering blades of grass welcome one into the city.
The grass has not seen water for some time and goat manure and red alien soil is still evident along the strip separating the dual carriageway.
A kilometre or two from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the scene where Mutua posed with a group of youths with red T-shirts planting flowers, tells a different story.
Only a handful of flowers still ‘flourish’ as stunted explosions of red and yellow. A few metres away, the ground is littered with gaping holes still waiting to be planted with anything green.
