City Hall on life support, needs serious cleanup

The city of Nairobi is not administered or managed. It is the fiefdom of auctioneers.

The rot is total. The grip of cartels is absolute. Plans approved blind, inspections signed in restaurants, envelopes stuffed with cash take the place of building codes. Clerks fix stamps for towers they have never seen.

Behind them, the greed of developers, bursting with criminal cash, building, not homes or offices, but death traps. Every inch pinched, every regulation rubbished, every shilling squeezed for an extra tottering floor.

Helped by reckless engineers selling their stamps for a fee, professionals without a conscience. They put signatures to buildings they have never seen.

Then the short-cut mad builders, saving cement money, throwing in extra sand, deploying thinner steel. Putting up a death trap in broad daylight.

Below them, desperate labourers, barefoot in concrete, their lives cheaper than a bag of cement.

And the hapless tenants and their families with children, assuming all is well because the paint is fresh and rooms spacious.

The system is on life support. Corrupt and murderous. Until City Hall is cleaned, we shall tearfully make burial plans every time a block implodes.

Every crack demands urgent attention. The next disaster must be a site under construction right now. We are putting it up, confidently, one floor at a time.

When will City Hall mandarins learn that greed is a bottomless cup and no amount of wealth can fill it up?

Quote of the Day: “Never trust people who promise to make you rich in a day. They are generally crazy swindlers.” —Italian writer Carlo Collodi (The Adventures of Pinocchio) died on October 26, 1890

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