What about accepting realities in our natural environment?
Every other day in recent years, nature has been ‘talking’ to us through recurrent droughts, excess rains & floods, land slides & extreme winters & summers and ‘ice rains’ among other phenomena in different parts of the world.
The experiences have, so far, been awakening awareness and consciousness.
Consequently, diverse efforts are now in place globally trying to preserve and conserve our environment.
In Kenya, and especially in Nairobi City, though several environment and conservation efforts are in place, people may have to honestly face several realities.
In places such Dagoretti (previously part of the wide world Kiambu county), population growth and rising urban sprawl has led to fragmentation of lands which have been subdivided into tiny plots and most of which are now bursting with all manner of residential houses.
In the area, notably, some of the natural wetlands were situated in individual people’s lands.
The most notable include the area known as ‘Swamp’ along Kikuyu rd and near Riruta and another known as ‘Kariie’ near Waithaka ward main administration epicenter…
.. . In the 1950s to around the 1970s, acres of this land (swamp) were a wetland and indeed there was a pool of water (akin to a minute lake or dam) where youngsters of the time used to swim.
The wetland had even earned the name ‘mutindu’ coined from the phrase ‘mutindute’ the emergency call or cry from youths and boys who happened to have gone to ‘mutindu’ lacking enough swimming skills and who would cry out (mutindute) on the verge of getting drowned.
With time and rising population and urbanization, owners of the land subdivided and sold the same which is today awash with very many high- rise apartments and flats in the new urbanization reality.
I believe that the owners/developers of the apartments & flats, spent fortunes in rehabilitation of the lands to accommodate the buildings.
When rains fall in the area, a lot of water is generated and ends up flowing into the nearby ‘Nyongara’, a tributary of the Nairobi River.
Notably, the Nyongara River emanates from a spring or fountain or source in the rocky Kikuyu area just near the UoN Kikuyu campus. The fountain is said to get its water from an underground river or Crack that draws its water from the ‘Ondiri Swamp’ several kilometers further afield..
The Nyongara river is joined by the ‘Kabuthi’ river possibly its only tributary at some point behind the apparently dormant ‘Waithaka’ Shopping Centre. River Kabuthi has its source possibly somewhere inside the ‘Thogoto’ forest from where it flows to join ‘Nyongara’ river.
Back to the Riruta & its environs massive construction projects, one can, in retrospection, wonder what would happen if the former Riruta huge swamp, perhaps interconnected with underground rivers, was to suddenly or gradually decide (as guided by ‘Mother nature’), to reclaim its former Swamp status?
Such could be deemed as wild thoughts yet we hear daily about nature never forgetting when we mishandle its rhythms…..
The ‘Kariie’ swamp was relatively small but todate still gets filled up with water. In the current rains, for instance, this is the only place in the area that is housing frogs that seriously croak every other evening evoking nostalgic memories.
But essentially, we should face the reality that God almighty in His wisdom demarcated lands into areas for human and animal settlements and into wetlands and forests that would progressively collect massive surface water amounts which would then gradually seep back into the ground water table for appropriate nature & water balance….
