Nairobi can be cleaner, if our leaders want

Nairobi County CECM Green Nairobi Community Maureen Njeri(centre) and Lt.Col Kahigu Njoroge(right) tour Nairobi River at Lucky Summer during the Mazingira Day at Kamukunji on October 10, 2025. [Boniface Okendo, Standard]

On Friday, Kenyans celebrated Mazingira Day. This year’s celebration came at a time when Nairobians are fed up with the filth chocking the city. It is hard to overstate how filthy the city has become. There is dust everywhere.

Few parts of the city have clean roads and sidewalks. The rivers stink with raw sewage. Sewers routinely clog and spew their contents into the streets. Water is scarce, with households getting water intermittently throughout the week. Everyone who can afford it has a borehole or pays water trucks to deliver water every other day. And all that before we get to the question of aesthetics.

To put it mildly, the city is not easy on the eye. Most public works projects have no soul. The point always seems to be to make money from projects rather than build something functional and beautiful for the ages. Nairobi and many of our urban areas can be better. From the basics like 24/7 running water, to clean and walkable sidewalks, to clean and safe markets, to comfortable public spaces. We can have it all, but only if we want to.

Unfortunately, at the moment much of the political leadership is caught in a bind. Nice things are expensive. Nice things require planning and disciplined execution. Nice things require consistent maintenance. And nice things require a society that values nice things. As a people, at this point in our history we are unfortunately far below par on all these measures. We are not disciplined enough in management of our public finances to afford nice things. For example, there is a world in which Nairobi County (and other counties) had veritable public works departments that produce the materials needed for construction on the cheap.

These can be profit-making joint ventures with private firms, able to supply the private sector as well. The idea would be to enable innovation and device new ways of keeping costs low. However, this cost-saving approach would mean loss of rent-seeking opportunities and hard work. It is therefore simply not an option. Another innovation would be to appoint and empower an office of the County Architect and empower them to redesign and executive a plan to clean up the city – starting with improving the lived environments in lower-income areas. Discipline requires a unified view of goals.

And when it comes to city planning, history teaches that centralisation delivers results. This is not a case for a soulless top-down planning. There’s definitely a case for eclecticism. Each part of Nairobi should have its own aesthetic. But even those local peculiarities should feed into an overall idea of a working city – from the perspective of other infrastructure like transportation, water, electricity, schools, hospitals and the like.

Finally, we need a radical reorientation to believe that we deser