Greed subdues leafy estate, quickly turning it into a slum

In years gone by, New Donholm Estate was the place to live in Eastlands. It had class. It was well planned and the buildings were spacious and trees enveloped the beautiful scenery with a pleasant breeze.

But now, the estate is an eyesore. Those who live there are embarrassed to give their address. This is because unplanned flats, or apartments, rising to eight or even ten floors, have robbed the estate of its beauty. The high density that was not envisioned has stretched the sewer lines, roads and electricity.

Now craters have taken over the roads while power outages are the norm. It is normal here to find a church, a bar and a residential house just metres apart.

At the estate we meet Phanice Kilii who lifts her eyes to the darkening skies, worry shadowing her face.

The gathering dark clouds make her heart race with uncertainty and fear. Besides heralding a heavy downpour, the impending rains could mean a night spent sequestered in her home.

Marooned in her own compound by spewing sewage, made worse by the torrential rains that have hit the city in recent days, Kilii is the epitome of a city’s poor planning gone terribly awry. It is so terrible that in every estate from South C to Madaraka, and all the slums inn between, desperation is all you find and a prayer to God to halt the rains.

For days now, Kilii has not been able to leave her house, thanks to the sea of stinking sewage.

“The bad sewage situation in New Donholm is well-known, but the rains have made the situation worse a thousand times over,” Kilii says, slowly, sadly. “It’s like we are living in a biblical deluge, only this time the liquid that is devouring us is a mass of flowing sewage.”

Worse still, Kilii says the flowing sewage infiltrates the fresh water supply pipes putting residents in grave danger of contracting water-borne diseases.

Three days earlier, Kilii was admitted to hospital with symptoms of diarrhoea and vomiting.

Currently, Nairobi is on red-alert for cholera after the disease, whose cause is linked to poor sanitation, claimed several lives in the city.

Diarrhoea and vomiting are the major symptoms of cholera.

Billed as a middle-class estate at inception, New Donholm’s paved roads have long been washed away and the drainage system has been destroyed by unplanned high-rise structures.

The estate’s sewer system is a 1980s relic meant to serve just a few maisonettes, but it now serves close to 60,000 households.

Ironically, since 2000, New Donholm has attracted a huge number of middle-class residents who are now paying the price of this deterioration.

“When I arrived in New Donholm in 2001, it was a well organised estate even though it still lacked certain amenities like paved roads,” Michael Oganga, a banker observes.

But now Oganga has to wade for 300 metres through thick mud while negotiating between high rise buildings to access the bus stage on Outer Ring Road.

“It gets worse with heavy rain because sometimes the mud is knee-deep,” he says.

He is now forced to invest in extra items such as gumboots to survive the rains.

“Sometimes it is very embarrassing because I get to the office in gumboots. Then people start to ask whether I live in a slum,” he says rather sarcastically.

The senior bank employee is even embarrassed to invite colleagues to his house due to the appalling conditions that abound in the estate.

The roads are hell for motorists. “There is no joy driving on the estate roads whether in the dry or wet season,” says John Kariuki, a company executive.

“During the dry season you will be choked by dust. In wet seasons, you literally drown in the little lakes that form in the middle of the roads,” he observes.

But the economic implications for New Donholm’s drivers are far-reaching.

Driving on a bad road submeregd in water can be the most challenging, even when you drive a good car, explains Kariuki.

“You see in those circumstances, you don’t know what you are driving over. It could be a sharp object which could puncture your tyres or worse still a huge stone which most likely will rip apart the car’s sump,” Kariuki explains.

Where did the rain start to beat New Donholm?

In the 1990s, there was a huge influx of Somali refuges — occasioned by the civil war in their country when President Siad Barre was ousted from power.

At around the same time, the civil war in Sudan intensified sending tens of thousands of South Sudanese refugees into Kenya. While thousands of these incoming refugees ended up the refugee camps in Daadab and Kakuma, a few well-to-do Somalis and South Sudanese found their way into Nairobi.

Most of them came with bags full of money — literally — but due to strict regulations in up-market neighbourhoods, New Donholm, Savannah, Greenfields and Eastleigh became the next property destination.

Somalis were willing to pay anything to secure accommodation, explains Sammy Wango a real estate businessman.

“In New Donholm, the rents shot up from as little as Sh6,000 for a three-bedroom main house, to Sh35,000 in a day,” he explains. Many landlords kicked Kenyan tenants out to accommodate the ‘loaded’ newcomers, some of whom paid rent for a whole year.

What followed was a flurry of construction activity to cash in on the refugees’ money.

High-rise buildings came up in a flash. Building and construction regulations were not adhered to as compromised City Hall officials looked the other way.

Soon the estate was teeming with unplanned high-rise buildings with many more coming up every day. Recently, however the estate has started paying the price for this unplanned construction boom.