PHOTO | FILE Garbage falls off a Nairobi County truck on its way to a dumpsite.
NATION MEDIA GROUP
If the daily complaints in this newspaper’s Op-Ed pages are to be trusted, Nairobi is becoming one huge refuse dump.
One
of the latest complaints went: “Nairobi is becoming increasingly
filthy. Today there is garbage all over the place… How do we deal with
the hawkers responsible for the menace? Can the county government act
before an epidemic breaks out?”
While the reader
singled out hawkers, garbage handling is easily the greatest challenge
Governor Evans Kidero faces in managing the city.
According
to Mathieu Mérino in an article titled ‘Management of garbage in
Nairobi: Perspectives of restructuring public action’, in the book:
Nairobi Today: The Paradox of a Fragmented City; public services,
particularly management of garbage, benefited from major investments by
the colonial authorities from the beginning of the 20th Century.
“By
1910, the town authorities were using enough staff to ensure the
regular cleaning and maintenance of public areas (especially the
streets) and the collection and disposal of garbage,” writes Mérino,
adding, “waste management worked relatively well until the mid-1970s.”
Today,
a combination of factors, including an apparently overwhelmed county
government and Nairobians’ peculiar habits of relieving themselves on
pedestrian overpasses, has ensured that footbridges that were meant to
minimise road accidents are rarely used.
And what
seemed like public health crisis has morphed into a security issue
following the recent Dandora dumpsite gang shootings.
The
population of the 32,000-square-kilometre city has grown from 325,000
people 50 years ago to 3.1 million as per the 2009 census, which is
perhaps why Governor Kidero appointed one-time Nairobi Town Clerk John
Gakuo to take charge of the Water, Forestry and Natural Resources
docket.
Although he was sworn into office
mid-September, Mr Gakuo’s appointment is yet to yield any fruits—a
paradox given that during his tenure as town clerk, Nairobi acquired
some semblance of cleanliness, hence Nairobians’ excitement when he was
appointed to his current docket.
Ironically, several initiatives have been undertaken over the years to restore Nairobi’s lost glory.
Back
in June 1994 when the Kenya National Environmental Action Plan (Neap)
was evolved, strategies were forged whose implementation would have made
the city’s ubiquitous garbage menace history.
Nema’s
first director-general Michael Koech told the Nation in an interview
that environmental pollution and solid waste management was among the
nine task forces he formed in the build-up to the drafting of laws to
protect Kenya’s environment.
The Neap was the backbone
of an environmental Bill that resulted in the 1999 Environmental
Management and Coordination Act, Prof Koech of Kenyatta University said.
The law, he says, has everything needed to manage solid waste.
The law, he says, has everything needed to manage solid waste.
NEAT AND LIVEABLE
The October 2010 Preparatory Survey for Integrated Solid Waste Management in the City in the Republic of Kenya, which was prepared for the then City Council by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica), among others, is one of the latest efforts at outlining what must be done to make Nairobi as neat and liveable as other global capitals.
Implementing
the document would see Nairobians breathe some fresh air like they did
during Mr John Michuki’s stint as Environment minister.
While
the Jica document cites insufficient funds for the city’s failure to
implement clean-up initiatives, it also stresses the need for a legal
framework for the public-private partnership in the management of solid
waste, meaning, city clean-up is the responsibility of every Nairobian.
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