After nearly three days of silence and growing public pressure, Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja has finally spoken out following the deadly collapse of a multi-storey building at South C shopping centre.

In a press briefing on Sunday, January 4, 2026, when he visited the scene, the county boss revealed that he had been out of town and made a point of prioritising the visit upon his return.

“I was away. This is the first place I have come to so that I can see what the disaster response teams are doing,” Sakaja explained.

This comes after calls from leaders for the authorities to conduct a swift probe into the identified areas and prosecute those found culpable of the crime.

For instance, Embakasi East Member of Parliament Babu Owino called for urgent action over poor oversight that he says contributed to the collapse of a building.

Taking to X on Friday, January 2, 2026, Owino issued a public statement highlighting the risks posed by unauthorised construction and weak enforcement of safety standards.

“We are deeply shocked and saddened by the collapse of the 16-storey building under construction in South C, Nairobi County, an incident that has left families in anguish and emergency teams scrambling for survivors,” he posted on his X account.

However, on his part, Sakaja has defended his administration against accusations that it looked the other way as the building’s developers blatantly violated building regulations, even going ahead to construct two additional floors despite having obtained approvals for only 12, leading to the pancake collapse of the structure on Friday, January 2, 2026.

Instead, he called for the conferment of prosecutorial powers to counties to enable them to rein in developers who violate regulations, adding that the law currently limits the devolved units to issuing statutory approvals with little intervention in the case of infractions.

“There are challenges in the enforcement of the regulations that we have expressed in the past. Once a developer gets statutory approvals, as was the case with this building, sometimes when there are infractions, and they are charged, the charges get dropped, or they get a Ksh20,000 fine,” he stated.

He said that the Nairobi City County government says it flagged the collapsed building at least three times in 2025, including when it raised an alarm with the developer last month.

According to the governor, the approvals for the building were issued properly. However, there were enforcement issues over certain infractions like resisting inspection and going beyond the line.

Sakaja on project owners

Moreover, the county chief has slammed a section of owners of fronting qualified professionals when seeking approvals, only to drop them after obtaining the clearance and settling for less qualified workers at the construction phase, where dangers abound.

“When the regulations are violated, what we do as a county is to issue an enforcement notice. The constitutional mandate to charge or prosecute is not with the county. This lies with the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP). In this case, the charges were dropped,” he stated.

“That is why we are saying, as counties, that we want the prosecutorial powers because the threshold demanded by ODPP for the cases sometimes is too high. We’ve had many issues since the powers were taken away last year.”

Meanwhile, rescue and recovery efforts are in progress at the collapsed South C Shopping Centre building, marking a sombre moment on the third day of searching for suspected missing persons.

In a media brief issued on Sunday, January 4, 2026, Incident Commander and Director of the National Disaster Management Unit, Duncan Onyango Ochieng, confirmed that significant progress has been made at the site, even as operations remain highly delicate and risky.