Yes, amend this law that steps aside long before a building collapses

Rescue efforts at the collapsed storey building in Eastleigh 9th street in Nairobi County. [Benard Orwongo Standard]

Last Friday in Eastleigh, eleven shops were operating on the ground floor and in the basement of a building still under construction. No one had cleared the area for anyone to stand inside. Then it came down on them.

As I write, all sixty-seven workers on site are accounted for. The eleven people in the shops below are not. Investigators will determine what brought it down. Join me as we critically examine what is permitted everywhere.

You need the county's permission to build. Section 58 of our planning law provides that if the county does not respond within sixty days, permission is deemed granted. Therefore, silence is approval.

Say the drawings were sound anyway. Section 59 places the duty to use a registered engineer on the applicant. The professional must prove his credentials only when asked. No public office is required to ask. Say the building was properly finished. The occupation certificate everyone discusses is in the code. The code does not specify who issues it or how to apply for it. We blame developers for lacking a document the law never says how to obtain.

Say an inspector came and issued a stop notice. The county still cannot prosecute on its own. Article 157 gives that power to the Director of Public Prosecutions and allows Parliament to pass it to others. For counties, Parliament never has. Ten days before the Eastleigh menace, Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja told a Senate committee exactly that.

Someone undertaking a development worth Sh2 billion, he said, may be willing to risk paying Sh5,000 if caught. Defy a closing order on a lethal building, and the fine is only Sh1,000 per day, if the order is ever issued. Be fair about blame. The men on that site did not choose the mix. The officer issuing the notice has no authority over anyone who ignores it.

I must confess my share: I have buildings standing with people inside. On one, professional advice showed me that the contractor had cut corners and that an extension had gone up without the project engineer's knowledge. He never came, never supervised, never signed off. The voice that said it would probably be fine spoke to me for a week. Last week, I pulled it down, an expensive decision, yet the cheapest. Both the Eastleigh building and my own came down. Only mine was a choice.

The law stepped aside in my county, too. On the Mutendea River in Kitui, donor money channeled through a local church built a wall to hold water for the community. No one cleared the wall, either. No one came back to check it. It broke, creating a huge mess. Half of Munuve Kamundi's farm went down that river: the terraces, sixty years of soil that fed them maize and fruit, and trees their father called sacred, some two hundred years old.

The family it was meant to rescue has been told to hire a bulldozer to push the river back because the works were never authorised. This is a green matter. With the expected more-than-average rains, the ground beneath every shortcut is getting softer this month. That building had no one asleep in it. Who knows about the next one?

Fifty-two died at Huruma, in a building on a riparian reserve, after a downpour. The owner was jailed this April, ten years later. The four state officials who were tried alongside him walked free.

So let Parliament write the line it has never written. Let counties prosecute, as Governor Sakaja proposes. Publish the names of every dangerous building. Owners, go back this week and check. And the rest of us can ask, at any counter, who cleared this building for us to stand in.

Surely, a man who added a floor he never declared has decided that the people beneath it do not matter. Unfortunately, our law agreed with him because we wrote it. Think Green, Act Green.