Governor Sakaja's recent opinion piece in the Daily Nation, titled 'Nairobi metro dream is becoming a reality, finally', leaves much to be desired, and it arrives at a moment when Nairobi is once again at a crossroads.
We have been here before. A decade ago, it was a governor and his deputy tearing each other apart in public. Today it is a governor who built his political brand defending devolution now quietly leaning on the national government to collect the city's garbage, fix its roads, and light its streets – even as he unveils a Sh1 trillion metro rail plan meant to define Nairobi for a generation.
Faces change, but the county keeps facing the same structural problems that ended the brief, troubled life of the Nairobi Metropolitan Services. The bill Nairobians keep paying does not change either.
Nairobi's future will not be won by grand plans; it will be won by rigorously implemented policy. It will be decided by whether the city can finally fix the plain, unglamorous governance failures – unclear mandates, weak planning, missing paperwork, corruption and an absence of accountability – that have quietly killed nearly every ambitious plan before this one.
While the proposal is inspiring, we must revisit the city's history. Governor Sakaja insists his new approach is not a repeat of the NMS but a more transformative response to the city's current needs. Fair enough. But it is worth revisiting, in plain terms, what actually killed the NMS, because we are about to find out whether anything was learned.
It was born in 2020 out of chaos, established even as MPs were threatening to impeach governor Mike Sonko, and it never received a proper handover of duties or the funding to match them. Nobody could say, with a straight face, who owed what to whom.
By the time it was shut down in 2022, contractors were owed over Sh273 million, the agency itself had accumulated roughly Sh16 billion in unpaid bills, and it reportedly owed the county close to Sh100 billion more.
Meanwhile, the very problems it was meant to fix — bad air, insecurity downtown, crumbling roads — got worse, not better. The NMS did not fail for lack of money or good intentions. It failed because no one was ever forced to keep an honest book.
History has shown us that many setbacks the city faced did not happen in a vacuum. Nairobi has always been a city of extremes, and its numbers explain why governing it is so difficult. A town of 290,000 people at Independence is now home to an estimated five million, the majority in informal settlements where lack of water, bad roads, poor healthcare and insecurity remain persistent nightmares.
Many of the uphills the city under the sun face are human-designed—a decade of devolution without the institutions to match it, politics that rewards loyalty over delivery and planning that too often forgets the very settlements it is supposed to serve.
To his credit, Sakaja's administration has not simply watched the city crumble. A new Development Control Policy is meant to end the free-for-all construction and land-grabbing that has outpaced Nairobi's pipes and sewers for years. CBD walkways have had a facelift. There is real talk of modernising Gikomba market.
And then there is the big one: an underground metro, priced at Sh1 trillion, linking the CBD to Eastlands before reaching Westlands, Upper Hill, Ngong Road, and Langata — backed by Japanese and Chinese feasibility studies and a promised Sh388 billion from the national government. If even part of this is built, it will reshape how Nairobians live and move for a generation, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
But seriousness cuts both ways. The county recently suspended its own urban planning chief after anti-corruption officers found millions of shillings in his house. Four former officials are facing manslaughter charges over a building that collapsed on people who had trusted it was safe.
A trillion-shilling project riding on pension money and public debt cannot survive the same culture that has hollowed out garbage trucks and road repairs for years. The lesson of the NMS was never that Nairobi lacks vision. It is that a city of five million cannot be run on vague arrangements without clear accountability for people and resources—and Sakaja must be seen to lead that reckoning from the front, not merely announce it from a podium.
None of this is an argument for running back to Nairobi's old master, the national government. Talk of quietly reverting the county to its pre-devolution days is fantasy dressed up as pragmatism. No governor, no president, no State House adviser has the power to undo devolution by decree. Only a referendum can, and there is no appetite for one.
What Nairobians were promised was the right to run their own city — City Hall and all the obligations that come with it — and the honest answer to a decade of stumbles is better devolved government, not less of it.
What that actually looks like is unglamorous: procurement transparent enough that budgeted billions become working water pumps rather than brown envelopes; a professional bureaucracy that survives whoever wins the next election; drains fixed before the rains come, not after; and rules enforced consistently in Kibera and Korogocho, not only where the cameras are.
It looks like real jobs reaching the young people whose only present choice is informality or nothing at all.
Nairobi still holds real promise – a national park inside a capital city, a magnet for the world's diplomats and conferences, an economy that carries the country on its back despite everything working against it, and now a metro plan bold enough to reshape it.
But promise is not delivery, as this city has learned the hard way more than once. The standard for both the cooperation deal with the national government and the trillion-shilling railway is not how convincing they sound at the podium. It is whether mandates are clear, books are honest, and someone answers when they are not.
Nairobi has turned itself around before. It can do so again—the day its leaders decide that governing well matters more than being seen to govern.
