An 18-storey building collapsed in Eastleigh, Nairobi, and the more investigators dig, the worse the picture gets — because this building had absolutely no business being built in the first place. No construction approval from the Nairobi County government. No environmental licence from the National Environment Management Authority. And, in what might be the most suspicious detail of all, no traceable registration on the National Construction Authority’s online portal on the Friday the building came down — though somehow, conveniently, those records appeared by Saturday morning.
Let that sink in. A massive 18-storey structure was going up in one of Nairobi’s most densely populated neighbourhoods, and the people whose entire job is to stop exactly this kind of thing either looked away, moved too slowly, or — in the case of the NCA’s suddenly updated portal — may have scrambled to cover their tracks after the disaster had already happened. The project, identified as a proposed development on 9th Street, Eastleigh, is listed under developer 9th Street Plaza Limited, main contractor Stromax Holdings E.A. Limited, architect Emmanuel Mwangi Maina, and engineer Mugu Joseph Muturi. These are not anonymous ghosts — they are named, registered professionals who now have serious questions to answer.
The timeline here is damning and worth following closely, because it tells you everything about how impunity operates in Kenya’s construction sector. The Nairobi County government rejected architectural plans submitted by Emmanuel Mwangi Maina back in November 2024, meaning the county looked at this project and said no. Construction reportedly began anyway in June 2025, brazenly continuing into 2026 while the paperwork remained unapproved and the building kept rising. The NCA claims it registered the project on July 30, 2025 — a full month after construction had already started — and yet those registration details were nowhere to be found on its public portal until the day after the collapse. Engineer Raymond Karani, listed among the NCA’s senior management and responsible for registration, now faces scrutiny over why those records were so conspicuously absent and then so suddenly present.
NEMA’s role in this catastrophe is equally infuriating. The authority wrote to 9th Street Plaza Limited as recently as January 6, 2026, demanding clear architectural drawings with proper dimensions — drawings the developer had already failed to submit adequately. NEMA Director General Mamo B. Mamo confirmed that the company never resubmitted within the required 60-day window, leaving the project without an Environmental Impact Assessment certificate and therefore entirely non-compliant with the law. There was no EIA licence. There was no environmental approval. There was, apparently, no meaningful consequence either — because construction continued regardless.
Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja has acknowledged that the county knew and tried to act, stating plainly that the building had been going up without approvals and that enforcement efforts were frustrated by weak prosecutorial powers. His example is chilling in its absurdity: a developer in South C was taken to court for illegal construction and fined just Ksh. 15,000 for a project worth Ksh. 500 million. That is not a deterrent — that is an invitation. When the cost of breaking the law is a rounding error against the profit of breaking it, the system is not failing by accident; it is failing by design.
What happened in Eastleigh is not a freak accident. It is the predictable outcome of a system where approvals can be ignored, where regulators can be outrun, where records can apparently be backdated after a tragedy, and where the penalty for gambling with human lives is little more than a slap on the wrist. The young Kenyans dying or losing family members in these collapses are not victims of bad luck — they are victims of deliberate negligence by people who knew exactly what they were doing and calculated, correctly, that they would face no serious consequences. That calculation needs to change, and it needs to change now.
