It is pure greed and lack of foresight among Kenyans.

Nairobi started out well. By 1963 the city was still following the master plan laid out in the 1940s. There was a plan for an orderly expansion of the city. As the documentary describes, land was set aside for fire stations, road expansion, playgrounds, markets etc.

This land that was set aside was grabbed by well connected politicians. Now there is no land left to expand roads, or build firestations or drainage channels or sewer plants.

Aside from land grabbing, property developers have been allowed to expand even in areas which are unsuitable for expansion. They used to accomplish this by simply bribing city hall officials.

Thats why Nairobi is so chaotic in terms of floods, traffic, water shortages, poor housing, crime etc. In Nairobi if your house is on fire, good luck getting the fire brigade to come over.

This is why I keep saying that tribal voting is so bogus. These politicians divide us along tribal lines and while we are on wazua and in bars calling each other names, they are busy grabbing land and taking bribes.

We should be voting for politicians who solve these issues not ones who exacerbate the problem by grabbing land.

Now we are paying for 50 years of mismanagement that we have brought on ourselves.

And Now that there is no more land to grab in the estates, the next frontier for land grabbing is schools and Universities. One of these days we will end up in a situation where 50% of schools in the city have no playing ground because it has been grabbed.

This robbery of land never happen in London, Paris or New York. I can attest to this from a NY perspective. Its not perfect but expansion has been orderly.

I never see overgrown fields. In fact I see quite the opposite in primary schools. The field is so overused and overcrowded that there is no grass growing.

You are right when you say love of plots is the issue. The obsession with plots is bad. But what is even worse is the allocation of plots to political bigwigs in areas which should have been set aside for public use. This is especially true for road reserves.

For example, When Nairobi was first built, many middle class housing estates were actually equipped with fire hydrants underground in order to fight fires. Today , other houses have been built over these fire hydrants such that city council would have no chance of locating them for maintenance or even fighting a fire.

Sad. Illegal extensions and kiosks/vibandas have killed the once beautiful estate.

There is some stupidity a black man has, that i don´t really know where it came from. A missionary in Africa told me, although i found it racist then, that black people were created to do sports while white people were created to be academically superior. Sometimes, i think he was right although it is a hard pill to take

@fullykenyan You have to be stupid to believe such nonsense. We have very many academically gifted blacks including many professors even in the US.

@alba Jomo Kenyatta is NOT to blame for the mess in nairobi. When he died in 1978 he left what the world used to call "the green city in the sun". It was a city where you could even go window shopping at tom mboya street, river road at midnight. He even left a working public transport system and buses used to run on time, even at night. He left beautiful well planned estates even in eastlands eg buru buru, umoja, donholm etc with playgrounds, social halls etc. Then Moi took over and everything went haywire.