BONYO'S BONE: My floods, Your floods

Tonight, I pick a bone with all of us—individually, collectively, as Nairobians and as Kenyans.

It is time we ask ourselves the hard questions. Because if we are honest, we must also admit something uncomfortable: our inaction, attitude, and failure in basic civic duty have contributed to the crisis we now face.

Fellow Kenyans, we have failed ourselves and, unfortunately, we refuse to admit it—simply because it is easier to blame someone else and convenient to point fingers at the government, county authorities, or their engineers and planners.

But over the last few days, as floods swept through neighbourhoods and lives were lost, I have been struck by how quickly we shift blame away from ourselves.

Yet in many ways, we are participants in the very problem we condemn. We are the trash in it.

Let me start with a little history. The name Nairobi comes from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nyrobi, meaning cool waters. This city was once a swamp, a marshland. It only became a settlement in 1899 when the British built a railway depot to support the line connecting the port of Mombasa to Uganda. In simple terms, the very foundation of Nairobi tells us something important: this city was built on water.

Over time, planners worked to reclaim and rehabilitate the land. From early planning frameworks in the 1920s to the city’s municipal status in 1950, Nairobi evolved through deliberate urban design.

But somewhere along the way, planning gave way to greed. We abandoned the discipline of orderly urban development and embraced convenience and shortcuts.

Today, Nairobi is expanding into one endless concrete sprawl, often without respect for drainage systems, wetlands, or river corridors.

We buy and rent houses built right on riverbanks, marketed to us as “beautiful views.” We admire the scenery but ignore the danger.

We dump garbage without asking where it ends up until the smell becomes unbearable. We overload sewer systems designed for single dwellings with entire blocks of apartments and only complain when the pipes burst.

In traffic, we casually toss plastic bottles and wrappers out of our car windows, confident that the rain—the very rain we now curse—will wash it away.

But rain does not erase waste. It carries it into drainage systems, which ultimately block rivers—a perfect mix to turn streets into rivers and homes into pool parties.

Climate change is real. Extreme weather is becoming more common around the world.

However, the reality is that climate change alone does not block Nairobi’s drains or dump garbage into the rivers. Climate change did not approve buildings on wetlands. We did.

Fellow countrymen and residents of the city under the sun, though now under water, if we are to demand accountability from those we elect, then we too must raise our own standards of responsibility. Let us also elect better leaders.

We must protect riverbanks instead of encroaching on them, just as we must stop bribing officials to approve buildings where none should stand. If we are to survive this storm, waste management must be taken seriously.

Let us attend public participation forums and ask hard questions when entire forests of identical high-rise buildings are proposed in neighbourhoods with no drainage capacity.

The cost of our negligence is no longer speculative. Lives are being lost as homes are destroyed and families are displaced.

This is not just about governance—it is about our civic responsibility, our duty of care.

We cannot continue choosing convenience over responsibility. Let us confront the culture of indifference within us and change it. Because the truth is simple: if we continue abusing this city, this city will continue reminding us who is really in charge. And right now, Mother Nature is angry.