City under water: Nairobi drowned by poor leadership, planning failures and corruption

Confronted over the perennial flooding in Nairobi, a number of the county’s leaders have discovered a ready answer to give to anyone who cares.

“But Nairobi was built on swampy ground,” goes the excuse.

One can barely refute that claim. Nairobi, in its formative stages, caused great discomfort among experts of the time, who felt it was uninhabitable from the outset. Once it had become the railway headquarters at the onset of the 20th century and European, Asian and African settlements were beginning to take shape, a few disasters struck one after the other.

In 1902, the bubonic plague, a severe, potentially fatal infection caused by the bacteria and transmitted primarily through the bites of infected fleas found on rodents, struck as a mischief of rats colonised the streets.

Eleven years later, about 14,000 malaria cases were reported in Nairobi, again caused by the suitability of the environment to support breeding of mosquito swarms, including through the digging of shallow wells.

Since, as the population of the city has grown to estimates of more than six million currently, according to PopulationStat, plans to relocate it have been mooted.

What started as a meeting point between the Maasai, Agikuyu and Akamba, the communities soon eyed Nairobi, for its impeccable climate and plentiful waters.

For its attractive weather, the Maasai called it Enkare Nyorobi, ‘the land of cool waters’. It was attractive to everyone who toured it, and sat on a high-altitude volcanic plateau, around 1,770 metres above sea level. The British swiftly moved their capital from Machakos, which had been bypassed by development.  

Over time, the city has experienced a plethora of challenges, the latest being the devastating flooding of the evening of March 6, 2026, presently the main topic of discussion across Nairobi.

Speaking to the media, Edward Muriuki, the acting Director of Kenya Meteorological Department, had warned that heavy rainfall was expected across a good number of counties, with a circular released by the department indicating that the torrent was going to be heaviest between March 6 and March 9. Among the counties mentioned was Nairobi.

When the skies finally cleared, more than 25 people had been killed, and over 70 vehicles damaged, some of them dragged along streets and dumped in ugly heaps.  

When Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja was asked why the city was flooding as much as it was, he was quick to remind his interviewer that the city was built on a swamp, and that, therefore, the floods were to come.

As he defended his team’s response to the flooding, he faulted funding directed at the city, which he claimed is not enough to satisfactorily address the city’s challenges, including actualising a planning rethink.

“It cannot be resolved through quick fixes,” he said. “The drainage was built for 500, 000 people, planning and development control for a smaller city than we have today.”

Flooding in Nairobi is not new. In 1961, the governor of Nairobi, Sir Patrick Muir Renison, sought assistance of his colonial seniors in fixing transport and communication when around three days of rainfall left the city severely flooded, with operations largely crippled.

Military engineers were sent to rebuild broken systems, and a rescue mission, that ran for days, was launched amid destruction of homes and property.

Between May 1997 and February 1998, the El Nino floods hit Kenya. They were hugely calamitous, submerging parts of Nairobi and displacing thousands. The city’s drainage systems were overwhelmed, the Nairobi River burst its banks, with sediment that was deposited further off the river’s reserves.  

After over two decades of relatively manageable conditions, the weatherman announced, ahead of the return of the El Nino in late 2023 to early 2024, that Nairobi would be among counties worst hit by the rains.

Rains started in earnest towards the end of 2023 and, by April of 2024, flooding in the city was displacing tens of thousands and damaging crucial infrastructure.

It was a scare, but not a complete shock, therefore, when the recent rains brought water surging through the city, sweeping away people, knocking down cars, creating power outages, and displacing many.

On June 9, 2025, speaking to TV47, Roots Party leader and former presidential candidate George Wajackoyah called for relocation of Kenya’s capital from Nairobi to Isiolo.

It was not an entirely new suggestion. Isiolo has been seen as the ideal placement for the new capital city, favoured for its central geographical location, sufficient space for expansion, and strategic position along the Lamu Port South Sudan, Ethiopia Transport (Lapsset) Corridor. 

The corridor is a regional multi-modal infrastructure programme integrating roads, railway and pipeline components in Kenya, South Sudan and Ethiopia.

Prof Wajackoyah argued that the city is sinking, and that the sinking happens because it was set on a swampy foundation. Its potentially calamitous ending made it, therefore, unsuitable to remain as the country’s political and economic centre in the long term.

“Nairobi City is sinking because it was built on a swamp. My proposal is to go and open up a new city in Isiolo, because of Isiolo’s proximity to Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and the Southern Corridor,” he said. The suggestion to move the capital city has for years been discussed as one of the surest ways of decongesting Nairobi, whose populations are estimated to cross 8.5 million in 2035, according to PopulationStat.

By contrast, Isiolo county is home to not more than 330, 000 people by 2025 estimations (with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) census of 2019 putting the population, at the time, at 283,139).

Tragic loss

According to planner and urban specialist Patrick Adolwa, some measures could have prevented some of the occurrences of that fateful first Friday of March.

“The tragic loss of life across Nairobi and other parts of the country could have been avoided,” he said.

He blamed weak governance, as some of his peers in the profession continue to insist that poor leadership, planning failures and corruption remain the key drivers of the perennial flooding crisis in Nairobi.

“Nairobi is not lacking in technical skills at all. I think what we seem to have is a perennial leadership problem,” said   Adolwa.

The planner noted that the governance issue, together with a rapidly rising population that puts serious pressure on infrastructure and natural drainage systems, leave the city exposed whenever the rain falls.

“Anywhere, even rural areas, has the potential for flooding. Here in Nairobi, especially, human settlements are in fragile ecosystems, and this significantly increases exposure and risk,” he observed.

After the 2024 floods, Alfred Omenya, an environmental architect, said: “Nairobi sits on a swamp but also has raised areas. Initial plans of the city had major roads parallel to the river system; construction on raised grounds, generous parks and open space system to enhance ground water flow management, percolation and drainage. Then clueless leaders took over.”

Kenneth Ombongi, senior lecturer at the University of Nairobi, is of a similar opinion. On his X account, he stated that the city’s flooding was both a geography and governance issue.

“Our capital rose from marshy ground, crisscrossed by rivers and anchored on black cotton soil. Yet human habitation, weak planning, and unrestrained greed have turned this natural vulnerability into a recurring trap. Unless we rethink how we build, drain, and inhabit this city, the waters will continue to remind us, tragically, of our collective neglect.”

Italian city

Venice, an Italian city of about 250,000 inhabitants, was built on a lagoon. The city, standing for more than 1,000 years, was set on many, densely packed upright wooden piles that are submerged in the lagoon’s waters, and which are driven deep and firm into the soft mud and clay below.

Netherlands’ capital, Amsterdam, one of the world’s most habitable cities, and famed for its walkability, is built much the same way. The city is under the sea level, and uses canals for drainage.  The city has famous canal houses built on timber foundations which never rot while kept underwater.  

There are many cities which can be cited for this feat, most of them standing solidly on marshland and running efficiently in spite of extreme weather.

Equally, there are cities which, at the slightest changes of weather conditions, suffer enormously, the most notable among them Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.

Nairobi seems to be joining, or is already part of, the latter category.

As Sakaja lamented the city’s historical and geographical disadvantage, he claimed that the city had been financially neglected for years, with lack of enough resources to address some of the most prevalent problems.

He said that the city cannot be fixed using the same revenue model as the other 46 counties, insisting that there needs to be a special financing agreement that supports the city going forward. The money was going to offset long-standing challenges, which had been inherited by successive leaders over the years.

“The capital city cannot be organised based on the share of revenue that it gets, like other counties,” he told Citizen TV.

The 2014 final report ‘‘The Project on Integrated Urban Master Plan for The City Of Nairobi’’, designed by the Nairobi City Council with technical support from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, suggested interventions to address the perennial flooding, including raising the rail levels in some areas higher than the highest level of the record flood, optimisation of a Flooding Detector System, and establishment of water collection in reservoirs by County government.

Alongside making suggestions that would ease traffic congestion, reduce informal settlements and challenges associated with them, and create solution to sanitation, it anticipated flooding and suggested, as a way of incorporating public views and co-creating solutions, public participation in development of drainage system, and the urgent construction of sub–drainage systems to connect to main drainage system.

Following the latest catastrophe, the Association of Engineering, Construction and Architecture Students released a statement on March 8, saying that the key causes of flooding were deficiencies in new road drainage channels, hydraulic overload of river systems, the ‘concrete jungle effect’ and infiltration loss (extensive use of concrete and paving blocks which prevent infiltration of rain water, poor design of major highways (including improper road sloping, leading to water pooling), and encroachment of riparian land.

In December, in a stark warning, whistleblower and strategy and innovation consultant Nelson Amenya wrote on his X account: “Nairobi has fallen. Open drainages, broken walkways and dirt on the sidewalks. This is not an accident. It is the result of Sakaja’s failed leadership and the total collapse of basic city management. Since he came into office Nairobi has collected more than $500 million through the Nairobi revenue system. Sakaja must be held accountable.”

Alongside criticising Sakaja’s leadership, political players are emerging in droves to promise alternative leadership, with the 2027 elections around the corner.

Citizens’ suffering

“The flooding in Nairobi reflects Kenya’s deeper challenges; poor planning, weak infrastructure, and a government that ignores citizens’ suffering. The united alternative government remains committed to listening, offering solutions, and restoring accountability,” a page affiliated to the United Opposition posted on X.

As he defended the county government’s response, Sakaja called for responsible handling of waste, saying that part of the responsibility squarely lay on the citizens whose habit of dumping in the streets was leading to clogging of drainage systems, and which he said would contribute to a huge difference once addressed.