Once in a while I receive photos of Pipeline estate in Nairobi covered in garbage. I have seen many such photos online. Pipeline estate is famous for all the wrong reasons. You can tell by the concerns of the residents that, despite loving their neighbourhood, it is not made suitable for them to enjoy living there.
Sharing photos of their rubbish-covered estate has been a cry for help but previous county governments in Nairobi did not seem to care about the plight of the residents. We could say the same for many neighbourhoods in our towns and cities, which have been neglected and turned into inhabitable, inhospitable and unhealthy neighbourhoods. No wonder cholera outbreaks tend to be worse in Africa. Whose fault is it? In Kenya, the problem lies squarely at the doorstep of the counties when it comes to garbage menace.
Counties have the responsibility of keeping public spaces clean, including those closer to neighbourhoods. This is not achieved by a token gesture from the government when it turns up only once, stand on a red carpet with a rake in hand and push one leaf into a pan for a photo-op. Garbage collection is a 24-hour, seven-day job; especially for a city such as Nairobi that claims to be a global ‘beautiful city in the sun’. Sadly, beauty, rotting garbage and open sewers don’t match. It is still a pig with lipstick rolling in a pigsty.
Legal duty of care
Non-collection of garbage, lack of clean running water and sewerage system is negligence. Counties and indeed the national government have legal duty of care to ensure that mandatory services run smoothly to enable taxpayers to get value for money and live with decency and dignity.
There should be no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ when it comes to offering mandatory services to residents. They should never be used as bait for votes either.
The reason residents elect political representatives is to ensure that services are brought closer to them and carried out as expected, failure of which should give residents the right to legally challenge counties, any agency responsible and political representatives.
Politicians in Kenya still assume their role is to care for themselves and their families and not the voters. It is not surprising that we are not hearing from the MCA in charge of Pipeline estate on garbage menace but the long-suffering residents instead.
Kenyans do not have the culture of challenging their political representatives when they fall short of expectations. Negligence is what many Kenyans have come to accept as a way of life. They would rather bury a loved one who died due to negligence in hospitals without a whimper than challenge the system for its failures.
The death of baby Travis Maina alias baby ‘Jembe’ is a good example of how we handle negligence in such a cavalier manner. To-date no one has been held responsible for the death of baby Travis. There are many such cases across the country’s hospitals that have gone unpunished. This is not so much about the doctors and nurses involved but about the government policy that sets the grounds for such negligence to occur in the first place. Poor facilities, unchecked corruption and poor funding are contributory factors. Baby Travis was more a matter for the police in the first instance than the Senate!
Putting money before life is the wrong basis to start from on emergency care. Saving lives in hospitals should always take precedence. If patients are failed in public hospitals, those failures must be blamed on the government if they are systemic.
We cannot continue to allow citizens to suffer indignities due to uncollected garbage and lose lives due to government officials shirking their responsibilities.
Years of ignoring noise pollution from bars and churches allowed to operate closer to neighbourhoods has had residents enduring diminished sleep and quality of life as counties and government agencies responsible for licensing venues continue blocking their ears to the problems caused by noise pollution as they chase bribes.
Blood on their hands
Traffic police officers too have blood on their hands as they ignore malpractices that lead to many deaths on our roads as they collect bribes. Rogue government agencies in charge of construction have done the same to the building industry.
The result is the lives of innocent Kenyans lost in the debris of poorly built apartments collapsing year after year. Arresting junior government staff is a kneejerk reaction and doesn’t end the rot at the top of government that allows for negligence to go on unchecked.
It is the responsibility of the government to set rules that must be strictly adhered to. Punishing government negligence is the best deterrence! We don’t see that happening often enough.
To restore faith in government and improve service delivery, negligence by government agencies must be punished. We must turn a new leaf on professional negligence to save lives. If government negligence is punished enough, we would have a well-ordered country.
