Your stalls are safe, MCA assures traders at Nanyuki bus park

Nanyuki, Kenya: Nanyuki Township Ward MCA on Sunday assured traders operating at the Nanyuki main bus park that their investment is safe in the face of a controversial town improvement project.

Peter Kimondo refuted claims that he is spearheading a move to allocate stalls to some residents despite a court case pending at the High Court in Nyeri.

A section of traders, who paid the former Municipal Council of Nanyuki Sh120,000 for a joint construction project for 126 stalls at the bus park, had claimed the MCA was behind the alleged illegal allocation exercise.

The 2010 case pending at the court has orders barring the former municipal council or its agents or successors from carrying out any allocations of the 126 stalls until the case filed by the traders is heard and concluded.

Health hazard

But the traders, led by Sammy Waite, claim that the MCA had on the weekend spearheaded an activity which saw some "favoured" traders allotted stalls despite them not being part of the original group which contributed to the municipal council.

"As far as we are concerned, all those people who were cleaning the stalls and painting them are outsiders and what they are doing is against the court order. We shall not take this lying down because this is our investment," Waite told The Standard yesterday.

Kimondo, however, refuted these claims and said the weekend activity was nothing more than a clean-up exercise of the area which had been overrun by garbage since the project was abandoned in 2010.

"The area was literally a health hazard and we cleaned it as advised by the Public Health Officer to prevent a disease outbreak and some genuine owners then decided to paint their stalls," he said.