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In a swarming satellite town outside Nairobi, a disturbing scene perfectly captures Kenya’s urban waste management burden. Just metres from street-level businesses that include eateries, two open drainage trenches serve as communal dumpsites, pointing to failing urban infrastructure and conflicting cultural practices.

This sight – replicated across numerous towns around the country, admittedly worse in some places than others – represents the challenge facing our rapidly urbanising nation.

The drainage system itself tells a story of urban mismanagement. Hastily built and seemingly designed to fail, it illustrates the familiar cycle of poor workmanship and patchy repairs that plague public works.

Shoddy work serves a cynical economic purpose: it ensures that contractors repeatedly bid for the same repair works every few years. As the year-end rains descend, these channels, meant to protect streets from flooding, instead harbour a toxic mélange of urban waste and could aid the very disasters they were meant to prevent.

Every conceivable form of refuse finds its way into these trenches: from candy wrappers and banana peels to bulkier items like cardboard boxes and disposable food containers. This indiscriminate dumping not only creates an eyesore but also poses a serious public health threat.

Decomposing waste, experts say, releases a dangerous cocktail of gases – methane, hydrogen sulphide, carbon dioxide and ammonia. While methane poses an asphyxiation risk in confined spaces, hydrogen sulfide can cause immediate health problems, ranging from eye irritation to respiratory distress, and in high concentrations, can be lethal.

For businesses operating nearby, especially food establishments, these conditions obviously create a health hazard for workers and customers.

But mixed in with this environmental health crisis is a deeper cultural tension. As Kenya urbanises, we are witnessing a collision between rural and urban attitudes about waste management.

Rural practices, where waste is often disposed of through burning or informal dumping in open spaces, are being transplanted into more confined urban settings.

The problem is exacerbated by inadequate urban planning and oversight. In this particular town, as in many others, the absence of proper waste receptacles and clear disposal guidelines leaves residents – especially those accustomed to rural disposal methods – with few alternatives.

It’s not even clear whether municipal authorities have established consistent waste collection schedules. Or, if collection days exist, they have not been communicated effectively to residents.

The result? As always in a rules-be-damned society like ours, people resort to what’s convenient for them, turning drainage channels outside their businesses or residences into de facto dumpsites.

More troubling is that these attitudes and their impact seem to have become normalised. Traders and pedestrians seem unfazed by the revolting stench from the channels, suggesting a dangerous acceptance of these unsanitary conditions as normal. It’s a worrying cultural adaptation to environmental degradation – when you live and work amid garbage, you might not even notice it’s there.

While the solution to the drainage channel problem might seem straightforward – they should be covered – this physical fix addresses only the symptom. The real challenge lies in addressing the cultural gap between rural waste disposal habits and urban requirements. And covering drainage channels without proper waste management systems might simply shift the problem elsewhere.

To state the obvious, many city dwellers come from rural backgrounds, where kitchen waste, for example, is tossed out onto open yards around homesteads for chickens, rabbits or goats to devour. These transplants often approach waste management through this lens. This means that simply imposing rules is insufficient. People must be helped to understand why urban waste management needs to be different.

As a start, what’s so hard about town managers recognising that waste needs to be collected and properly disposed of, and then setting up adequate pickup points and establishing reliable collection schedules? Haven’t county officials learned anything from their so-called benchmarking trips to well-run cities around the world?

— The writer is a Sub-Editor with People Daily-