The shattered glass on the display windows of a shop on Muindi Mbingu Street in Nairobi that sells apparel from a major American brand is still in place, weeks after looters tried to break in during one particularly nasty night of youth protests.

Farther down the street, in the City Hall complex, one building was torched and its soot-stained windows remain unrepaired. In the same area, the steel fence that had for years sheltered the Supreme Court parking lot at the corner of Taifa Road and City Hall Way was pulled down by rioters and a new one hasn’t gone up.

This and other damage elsewhere has added to the general sense of decay in the city centre.

Long before the protests began and deviants desecrated decades-old structures, many parts of downtown Nairobi were already in a bad way, blighted by time and neglect. Some places are especially appalling.

Take the eastern end of Haile Selassie Avenue, for example. Someone at City Hall decided that this section of the busy east-west artery no longer needed care. The short stretch between the Mfangano Street intersection and the Moi Avenue Roundabout will soon become unmotorable.

Street sellers have also taken over much of the westbound section of Haile Selassie between Weruga and Exchange lanes, inching ever closer to the median strip, itself an eyesore.

There are gaping manholes and abandoned paving projects seemingly everywhere the eye turns, and recently laid surfacing, shoddily done, is already unravelling, thanks to rain and stress from illegally parked vehicles.

On top of decrepit streets, there’s inept waste collection, or no waste collection at all. Nairobi always had trouble managing its garbage, but the problem appears to have worsened in the past four years.

City Hall officials themselves acknowledge the mess. Recent news reports cited disputes between the city and trash-collection contractors, who say they have not been paid for work done under a now defunct national government agency that temporarily managed some county functions. The governor told lawmakers recently that he’s not responsible for the unpaid bills.

Of course garbage collection migraines are not peculiar to Nairobi – metropolises the world over have a particular problem with waste – but City Hall doesn’t make it easy for people to properly dispose of their trash.

Walk down Muindi Mbingu from the University of Nairobi flyover to Mama Ngina Street and count how many waste receptacles you see. None! It’s the same story on other roadways, including the entire 900-metre stretch of Kijabe Street from the Harry Thuku Road link in the northwest to the Globe Roundabout in the southeast.

Uncollected trash and degenerating streets aside, the city centre, for some reason, is also unable to retain certain businesses. Before Covid hit in early 2020, there used to be a popular eatery on Muindi Mbingu, across from Jeevanjee Gardens, that served enormous, juicy burgers. It’s now shuttered. No new business in its place.

An ice cream parlour on Mama Ngina, near the Hilton, that I frequented on sunny afternoons in happier days no longer exists. An eatery on Kenyatta Avenue, near what’s now called the Bank of India, that served what I thought were world-class sandwiches is gone.

But even restaurants that survived the Covid upheaval seem to be struggling. Every time I walk by some of them on my way home on weekday evenings, I see rows and rows of empty seats, enveloped in an eerie silence that hints at something gloomier to come.

From a distance, Nairobi’s environmental and administrative miasma looks like a tangle of ineptitude, lethargy and complex, competing commercial interests. Too many people – from mama mboga to matatu racketeers and property barons – benefit from the city’s chaotic administration and are determined to sabotage any new moves that could alter the status quo.

— The writer is a Sub-Editor with People Daily; [email protected]