Cover your nose; this is Nairobi

Garbage mounds along Jogoo Road, Nairobi, July 14, 2022. [Collins Kweyu, Standard]

Along Mfangano Street, Carol Wangari works in an agrovet. Outside, matatus bound for the North Rift call for passengers. Their wheels are buried in mud despite rains not having fallen in some time.

"Mfangano is barely clean. But wait until the day the rains fall. The flood water will come all the way here," she points at the doorstep.

Dumping in the city is one of the causes of flooding, as garbage clogs up the drainage system. In such times, many parts are impassable.

High streets is not spared either, Tom Mboya Street is now lined with litter on either side of the road, and drains in many such parts of the city are full of plastics- polythene bags and bottles.

The city of over 4.4 million by day, according to The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) census of 2019, has a number of dysfunctional systems, one of which is drainage.

Soaring population, which has seen buildings come up and turn the city into a concrete jungle, has put a strain on the drainage system.

There are not enough open, unadulterated areas where rainwater can infiltrate into the earth, and the drains are either too narrow or too dirty, to allow the volumes of water the city releases every day to flow easily.

Njau Gitu, a governance, policy and strategy advisor, believes that decongesting the city could be a panacea to the dumping, hence drainage, problem.

"There are areas that have been designated as matatu termini. These spaces are outside the Central Business District (CBD)," Dr Gitu says.

"Moving a lot of human traffic outside the CBD will mean decongesting the city, and thus ensuring less dumping. Funds have been used to prepare these areas, and they should be put into use. These are zones that are easy to manage."

He also says that the Nairobi Central Business District Association should be actively engaged in creating solutions for a city whose streets are getting dirtier by the day.

Nairobi governor Johnson Sakaja romped to victory on the back of a promise to make Nairobi "work."

Uncollected garbage along Nairobi's Luthuli Avenue, July 21, 2022. [Denish Ochieng, Standard]

Before NIUPLAN was birthed, other plans, such as the Plan for a Settler Capital in 1927, focused on drainage in a settlement that had all the makings of a future big town.

Nairobi Metro 2030 set a goal of comprehensive storm water drainage and flood water mitigation plan. Nairobi Metropolitan Service Improvement Project (NaMSIP), a five-year project which was approved by the WB Board in May 2012, was after the same goal.

But years after the launch of some of these most elaborate plans, little has been done. Slowly, a lot of Nairobi CBD woes find their way into the upmarket residential areas. Whenever it rains, most of the city is a mess.

Traffic gridlocks

In April 2013, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Study Team initiated the infrastructure development planning for storm water drainage in Nairobi City and made primary observations of its situation during the rainy season.

JICA said that Nairobi City was suffering repeatedly from the localised inundation in many locations during the rainy season.

During a rainstorm, the inundation of the main roads causes traffic gridlocks in the city centre.

"A number of roads were washed and pitted with puddles even the day after the rainstorm. Storm water stagnation is attributed to the degradation of the living environment in housing areas," said JICA.

The causes were roadside drains not functioning effectively due to improper design, construction, structural deterioration, and lack of removal of sediments and garbage.

Further, it said that urbanisation in higher areas increases concreted ground surfaces with less infiltration capacity and results in the rapid concentration of storm water in the downstream areas.

Developed areas where topography forms a centralised low point (basin-like) with zero natural drainage for any generated storm water without the introduction of a significant storm water drain to carry the water out of the low point, with Runda Estate cited as an example.

Again, no action was taken to address some of these most pertinent issues.

"Any usable planning document for storm water drainage in Nairobi City is unknown. It was reported that a storm water drainage plan for Nairobi City had been prepared in the 1980s with support from the World Bank and GTZ. However, the document was neither available nor used in the City Engineering Department of Nairobi City Council (NCC)," NIUPLAN noted.

"There is no usable technical data available with the City Engineering Department of NCC for carrying out planning, design, construction, and maintenance of the storm water drainage system in Nairobi City at present.

"The absence of such technical data makes it hard to properly manage the development and maintenance of the storm water drainage system and results in problematic situations that remain unimproved as described before in subsection." it said.