- It has been a dark month of October 2026 in Kenya, with the country reeling from serious losses of life following a series of grisly road accidents and the horrific building collapse in Nairobi’s Eastleigh commercial neighbourhood.
- On October 3, seventeen pilgrims travelling from Mikindani Catholic Parish in Mombasa to the Subukia Shrine in Nakuru died in a road crash, two weeks before a building under construction came crashing down in Nairobi in what has been widely described as an apocalyptic scene.
- As Kenyans followed the rescue operations following the October 23 Eastleigh tragedy, another twenty-four Kenyans died in yet another painful road accident along the Nairobi – Mombasa Highway, adding to an already grim month of death and devastation.
Eastleigh’s 9/11 Scare
It is the Eastleigh building collapse, however, that has caught the attention of the rest of the world, following the circulation of viral clips from the scene. In one video recorded during the collapse, the building, wrapped in the typical green netting common to many other buildings under construction in Nairobi, came down vertically in a pancake fashion, raising a huge cloud of dust that pursued terrified residents, among them children who fled down the street in a desperate attempt to escape the scene.
Reactions on the internet, especially from Americans, likened the Nairobi incident to the September 11 terror attacks, when the iconic World Trade Center Twin Towers collapsed in a similar fashion after commercial jetliners crashed directly into them.
One of the people from overseas who reacted to the incident was Jeff Ostroff, a home improvement and DIY specialist whose response to the tragedy was among the most moving. Mr Ostroff was visibly shocked, at times burying his head in his hands in total disbelief at the scale of incompetence in Kenya’s construction industry.
With the memory of 9/11 in the back of his mind, the YouTuber expressed grave concerns over the state of Nairobi’s real estate sector and the millions of residents who could be at risk of being crushed to death in similar situations. The self-styled DIY engineer examined footage and pictures of the ill-fated building before, during and after the collapse, highlighting what appeared to be poor workmanship and an alarming level of disregard for basic construction standards among Kenyan property developers.
Chunks of plaster could be seen falling off the first-floor walls like leaves during autumn, exposing the shoddy workmanship and raising serious questions about the structural integrity of the building. In another embarrassing display of carelessness, sacks of cement lay unattended near a dubious opening just above the ground floor, while crudely laid bricks, resembling the work of schoolboys, were exposed as sheets of plaster came crashing down.
The ground floor then buckled before the entire building collapsed like the proverbial house of cards, leaving viewers thousands of miles away wondering how such a structure could have been allowed to stand in the first place, let alone rise in a densely populated commercial neighbourhood.
Kenya’s Knack for Mediocrity
What Jeff and other foreigners may not appreciate, however, is just how addicted the Kenyan populace has become to mediocrity, shortcuts and the deliberate abandonment of standards in pursuit of quick rewards. The government has already been caught napping, as usual, and is now in full reaction mode, scampering to rescue victims and manage the aftermath of what should have been a preventable incident.
Military officers and other security formations, dressed in full combat gear, have been deployed to hold the perimeter in a show of force that is conspicuously absent from numerous other potential crime scenes across the city, where similar negligence and disregard for the law continue to put lives at risk without attracting anything close to the same level of attention.
The circus at the county government level is even worse, with the Nairobi governor coming out to defend his administration by citing a lack of prosecutorial powers and the lenient treatment of offenders by the judicial system. This is the same authority that routinely shuts down small businesses and residential areas for flimsy reasons such as office partitioning and painting without approval.
Confusion and blame games have also persisted over whether Nairobi City County had issued the necessary approvals for the ill-fated building, with the various agencies involved appearing more interested in shifting culpability than in establishing how such a structure was allowed to rise and eventually collapse. As the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the National Construction Authority and other relevant institutions bicker over who bears responsibility for this costly tragedy, the focus should also be turned on Kenyan society itself, because the rot extends beyond government offices and the bureaucrats who occupy them.
An overwhelming majority of Kenyans have, time and again, demonstrated an alarming willingness to disregard rules and standards whenever doing so offers conveniece or cheaper route to personal gain. The country is gnerally obsessed with breaking laws, has an insatiable appetite for shortcuts and is driven by the desire to complete things quickly and collect the reward, regardless of the consequences for everyone else.
This behaviour is compounded by a serious weakness in integrity, where a small bribe is enough to secure an approval, silence an inspector or make an inconvenience disappear. The lives of ordinary citizens have become collateral damage in a senseless society where personal gain takes precedence over the common good.
While enraged Kenyans wonder why agencies such as the National Construction Authority and the National Transport and Safety Authority cannot do their jobs, the uncomfortable truth is that these institutions operate within a society whose own appetite for impunity continually undermines the very standards they are supposed to enforce. The NCA and NTSA have become associated with intensified compliance checks and public declarations whenever disasters strike, only for the urgency to fade as the news cycle moves on. Instead of building a culture in which compliance is routine and violations carry certain consequences, Kenya continues to operate in a cycle of negligence, disaster, public outrage, hollow promises and endless forgetfulness, with the next tragedy already taking shape somewhere in the background.
Kenyans are dying like flies and paying a heavy price for the reckless disregard for human life that has become normalised in the society they have built, defended and continue to tolerate. The Eastleigh collapse has again exposed this rot to an internationally, with viral footage bringing Kenya’s systemic failures into the homes of viewers who may never have set foot in Nairobi. Some Americans who watched the horrifying footage are now weighing which is one safer between sleeping in a high-rise building in Nairobi or going to Mexico on vacation. It is a very embarrassing for a country that prides itself on being a regional economic powerhouse.
