Allan Ngugi
2 October 2008
opinion
Nairobi — If there is one government agency that needs to be in the spotlight, it is the National Environmental Management Authority, (Nema).
It is the one that has the responsibility of seeing to it that Kenya's environmental standards are up to global ones, while spearheading restitution of the environment where such has been destroyed.
Of late though, it has been getting all the attention -for the wrong reasons. It has been going around arbitrarily closing down some selected slaughter-houses in Nairobi and making furious warnings to landlords in just one of its estates, Zimmerman over alleged lack of sewers.
One is not sure that this is such a novel discovery in a city two-third's of whose population lives in environs dotted with open or no sewers.
As it is, no one knows where this now very visible Nema has been all along as our air, water, lakes and rivers have become polluted to "uncleanable" extremes. Now, it's busy even cleaning up some streets in the name of environment.
Maybe this resurgent activism has something to do with the current occupant of the Environment ministry, but for years, Nema has done next to nothing as hills of garbage in Nairobi and other towns and raw sewage running across most low-income estates, have become the norm.
Perhaps, worst of all has been allowing the existence of a garbage dump site smack amidst some of Nairobi's most densely populated areas.
The medley of potentially poisonous gases and acrid smells that emanate from the Dandora site pollutes the air daily.
The first ones to absorb the fumes in this area are school children hosted on a kilometre-long span of schools parallel to the dump site.
Some years ago, the WHO raised its concerns about this lethal eyesore and its long-term effects with no answers forthcoming.
Equally damning is what has been done to the environment by some major companies and crop plantations.
These have been routinely accused of discharging toxic effluent in rivers and lakes. Lakes Victoria, Nakuru and Naivasha have had this problem for a long time.
Some fish have all but disappeared. Some big birds come out of the lakes featherless, while other flora and fauna have vanished but we have not seen the long arm of Nema in action.
The resurgent Nema, if it is serious in doing its job, owes Kenyans a few explanations like whether its mandate includes going around selectively closing a few abattoirs while ignoring thousands of others with similar problems or those others mentioned above.
Is it truly its job to go rustling up some landlords in Zimmerman over allegedly deficient sewer lines while ignoring Kibera or Mathare or similar slums in many other towns?
Such mandates clearly fall under the health and environment inspectorates of city and county councils. The agency's real function here would hence be to ensure that these and all other authorities conform to the laid down statutes.
It would also be over-seeing a holistic approach to cleaning all slimy rivers not just Nairobi's, ensuring there are modern-day garbage disposal systems or testing some questionable fuels that are turning the city into an oven, among many other tasks.
Nema then should be more like the American Environmental Protection Agency and not like some council busybodies.
The EPA cleans rivers, yes, but also watches the levels of poisonous chemicals, metals and other compounds in lakes and seas, radiation levels in the air, pollution from factories, gas fumes from vehicles, marine habitats and so on.
It is quite an onerous task which Nema can emulate if only on a much smaller scale.
The problem though is that there are many bodies in Kenya that do not quite know their mandates or clash in the process of exercising them.
This is what brings forth spectacles like Nema colliding with the minister for Public Health and Sanitation.
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