Nairobi: The green city in a fatal fog
Air pollution kills 8,000 people in Kenya's capital city each year. Now the city’s leaders are finally paying attention to the problem.
Joseph Kang’ethe, a bus driver on Thika highway, has a theory: Nairobi commercial drivers don’t stay in business long because the city’s air would kill them. He reckons staying on the job long is “like you are trying to kill yourself”.
He shares this theory with The Continent during the same week Nairobi is hosting the first-ever Africa Climate Summit. Billboards dotting traffic junctions tout the city as “the global environmental capital”. A claim not without merit: Kenya’s capital is home to the UN’s global environment programme.
Kang’ethe, however, is not sold. “The guy I replaced today is in hospital with asthma. Even though he is also a smoker, I think the air he breathes here also is dirty,” Kang’ethe says as he parks the bus in the CBD for passengers to alight.
“Most people have somebody around them who is asthmatic in this city.”
His claim is also not without merit: it’s backed up by experts and data.
Air pollution kills 8,000 people in Nairobi alone every year, according to Wanjira Maathai of the World Resources Institute. That air was graded as “unhealthy” or “unhealthy for sensitive groups” 10% of the times it was gauged this year by AirNow, a monitoring group. And the city’s air pollution is more than triple the level recommended as healthy by the World Health Organisation.
The poor quality frustrates Maathai on at least two personal levels. She is the daughter of Nobel prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai, who fought to preserve Nairobi’s green cover – and one of her daughters has asthma, which she attributes to air pollution.
“Most people have somebody around them who is asthmatic in this city.” She is no different and says: “Shock on me, I had a cough and found out that I had a pollution-induced asthma.”
The good news is that Nairobi leaders seem to be waking up to the issue. At a ceremony on the sidelines of the Africa Climate Summit, city governor Johnson Sakaja promised a five-year strategic plan, and to “ensure” that a new air quality bill was passed through the county assembly.
Sakaja was unveiling a mural painted in honour of Ella Roberta Debra, a British child who died of air pollution. The family lived near a busy road in the east of London when Ella developed a rare and life threatening form of asthma that killed her in 2010, a few months before her seventh birthday. This wasn’t initially reflected on her death certificate – something which drove her mother Rosamund to seek a court order to change the certificate. It was the first time in Britain that a death certificate had air pollution as a contributing cause to a death.
Now a global ambassador for the World Health Organisation’s BreatheLife campaign, Debra came to the Africa Climate Summit to urge leaders to take air quality seriously. Air pollution kills some 6.7-million people globally every year. In Africa, it kills more than a million people each year, with the majority dying because of air pollution inside homes, thanks to the smoke coming from wood and other biomass in cookers and fires.
Debra appears to have convinced Nairobi’s mayor, too.
“In the last few years, we have seen quite a sharp rise in pollutants and a decline in air quality. It’s now showing up in our mortality, and especially that of our children,” Sakaja admitted at the unveiling of the mural. “Every single child who misses a day of school, or who has a chronic dry cough, or who has to go to a hospital because he or she has breathed in diesel smoke, should matter as deeply to us as she does to her family.”