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“At the end of this century, Kenya will have a population of about 35 million people, 78% more than lived in Kenya in 1984. That population will include a workforce of 14 million people, 6.5 million more than in 1984. These future workers have already been born. To accommodate that workforce without a rise in the rate of unemployment, it will be necessary in the next 15 years almost to double the number of jobs in Kenya. Moreover, at current trends, the urban population will reach 9 to 10 million by 2000, over one-fourth of the total population, compared to only 3 million (15%) in 1984. Unless new workers can be attracted in large numbers to jobs in smaller urban centres and on prosperous farms, it will be necessary to build at least six cities the size of present-day Nairobi or to watch Mombasa and Nairobi expand into cities of two to four million each. And, unless those working on farms and in rural towns continue to raise their productivity, the rural population will be plagued by uneconomic subdivision of the land, migration into marginal areas, falling average incomes, and food shortages.”
Quoted above is the first paragraph of the first chapter of Sessional Paper No. 01 of 1986 on Economic Management for Renewed Growth. The chapter itself is titled “Kenya in 2000”. Following the economic crises of the ’70s and early ’80s, experts saw the need to look much further ahead, towards the end of the century, to determine what kind of an economy Kenya was going to have then and how it was going to get there. Thus the document.
In the years since the writing of the sessional paper, entrants into the labour market were not absorbed in “jobs in smaller urban centres and on prosperous farms”. Instead, and as predicted, Nairobi has grown into a city of over five million people, without the necessary infrastructure to accommodate the increased population as more and more people make their way to the city in search of employment opportunities. Whether they have succeeded in finding employment is another matter. What interests us here is the matter of their housing.
For convenience, the working class usually prefers to live close to their place of work. In the case of Nairobi, the main commercial areas include the Central Business District, Westlands and Upper Hill. To satisfy demand, there has been a corresponding surge in the supply of housing in these areas, with high-rise apartments mushrooming in Parklands, Kileleshwa, Kilimani and along Ngong Road.
These residential areas were designed during the colonial era. The roads, drainage and sewerage systems were designed to serve the small population of the time – at the time of their construction, neither Argwings Kodhek Road nor Limuru Road were expected to carry the capacity they now do. The drainage and sewage systems have not been adapted to the increased number of residential units and this has led to a decline in living standards in these areas which have become prone to flooding during the rains. Just like at Pipeline, but for the rich. Pipeline ya mababi.
The tree cover in these neighbourhoods is being cut down to make room for the multi-storey housing. Jerotich Seii came out guns blazing earlier this year in protest at the cutting down of trees to make way for the construction of a high-rise apartment along Nyeri Road. The once “Green City in the Sun” is steadily becoming the “Grey City Under the Sun”. Maybe it is true, as Eddy Ashioya says, that Nairobi is no longer the “capital city with a national park” but the “capital city that is a construction site”.
Older residents – that some refer to as NIMBYs – have voiced their opposition to these developments. They argue that they acquired their properties in these areas precisely because there are zoning laws that restrict the height of buildings. The high-rise apartments in construction disregard the zoning laws and infringe on the privacy of the older residents as the tenants of the new apartments have unobstructed views into their homes below. The older residents also argue that an over-supply of high-rise apartments will lead to a decline in the value of land and property in that area.
To satisfy the demand for housing, is it possible to find a way to build more high-rise apartments in close proximity to the CBD without making Nairobi look like a town in the old USSR? Or should we focus on the other alternative – building farther out of Nairobi and improving public transport into the CBD?
Building away
Sometime in 2022, my friends and I embarked on a trek around Kedong on the border between Nakuru County and Kiambu County, starting from the landmark that is the tiny Italian Church on the Nairobi-Mai Mahiu highway, all the way up Mt. Margaret, and down again to the Mai Mahiu SGR station for a train back to Nairobi, a 20 km trek that saw us wander around in the middle of the wilderness like Moses and the Israelites.
Kedong is sparsely populated; we came across fewer than five households on our trek. The station too was empty, and the parking lot even had long tufts of grass growing on it. The train to Nairobi got us to Ngong in three-quarters of an hour, a distance of 61 km. The ride cost us a hundred shillings each. The distance between the Nairobi CBD and Ruai is just 27 km, yet at times it takes close to two hours to cover that distance because of heavy traffic.
This experience brought two ideas to mind: How we can tap into the possibility of developing Mai Mahiu into a satellite town of Nairobi? Should we focus on up-scaling the drainage and sewerage services in the areas close to the CBD and continue to build more high-rise apartments to satisfy demand, or should we focus on developing the transport arteries from the CBD to Nairobi’s satellite towns and then build residential areas outside the city?
There is a lot of unused and unproductive land in Kedong that could be put to good use a residential area, instead of encroaching on productive agricultural land as is happening on the other side of Nairobi, in Kiambu County. The infrastructure already in place could be put to use, with commuters using rail transport into Nairobi – no traffic jams to worry about. Kedong, and by extension Mai Mahiu, would develop into bigger towns, triggering the migration of people from Nairobi to those areas and thus contributing to the reduction of congestion in the capital.
Similarly, a combination of adequate housing and reliable public transport to and from all the other satellite towns in the Nairobi metropolitan area (such as Kiambu, Kikuyu, Kitengela, Ngong, Ongata Rongai, and Thika) would further contribute to the decongestion of Nairobi.
Bringing improvements to road transport inevitably attracts more vehicles on the roads into Nairobi, exacerbating traffic congestion. Focus should, therefore, be on developing the rail system as it is the best form of mass transit – able to ferry large numbers of people from Nairobi’s hinterland at a cheap cost.
Clearly, however, Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja’s thinking is upwards rather than outwards; He has recently proposed a new Nairobi County land use policy that seeks to increase the floor limit of buildings to 75 floors.
