800 Million Shillings to Float on Nairobi River

Treasury Cabinet Secretary, Henry Rotich, presented to Kenyans the 2018/2019 national budget crushing some hope of thousands of Kenyan who had hoped for the easing of the cost of living.

The financial year budget stood at 3.07 trillion shillings, more than 400 billion shillings from the last financial year and the highest in the East African region.

The country’s public debt skyrocketed to 5 billion shillings as the government in an attempt to cut down on borrowing tries to impose taxes on Kenyans to collect more revenue.

Kenyans, however, were in for a rude shock when the CS announced the allocation of 800 million shillings for the rehabilitation of Nairobi River.

This will be the fifth attempt that the government is ‘throwing’ money into Nairobi River, a river that has continued to choke with garbage so much that it can barely flow, in an attempt to clean it.

In 1999, UNEP sponsored a major cleanup and restoration of the river but the program did not yield any tangible results. There was the second attempt between 2001 and 2003 which also failed and the third attempt between 2004 and 2008.

In 2014, Nairobi City County pledged 200 million shillings for the rehabilitation of the river which many saw a just a drop in an ocean. Then, the river needed between 700 to 1 billion shillings for a complete restoration.

If the government will have its way in this fourth attempt, more than 120,000 people in the informal settlement will have to be moved to pave way for the restoration of the river.

For many years, Nairobi River has been turned into an open flowing sewer as all major tributaries were turned into sewers flowing from the country’s capital.