City Hall threatens to evict estate tenants over rent arrears
What you need to know:
- Nairobi County owns a number of estates in the city.
- It says some tenants have defaulted on rent, while some property owners have defaulted on rates.
- It urged them to pay up, failing which tenants will be evicted and property owners fined.
Several Nairobi residents living in county houses risk being evicted if they do not pay rent arrears amounting to about Sh600 million owed to the County Government of Nairobi.
Finance Executive Danvas Makori said that hundreds of tenants living in county houses, especially in Eastlands, have defaulted in paying rent to City Hall.
PAY UP
He asked them to clear the arrears before action is taken.
“We have sent them demand notices to make sure they pay in time so they don’t have to face any adverse actions,” said Dr Makori on Sunday.
Nairobi County owns some estates in Nairobi including Jamhuri Estate, Old and New Ngara, Jeevanjee/Bachelors Quarters, Kariokor and Buru Buru.
DEADLINE
Also, rate payers in the county have been put on notice, with Dr Makori calling on them to renew their licences before the March 31 deadline.
He said City Hall would not extend the deadline and defaulters would be charged three percent interest per month.
“I would like to urge all Nairobians, especially the business community, to take advantage of the days remaining so as not to pay penalties. The same applies to all property owners.
“We will stick to our programme and there will be no extensions...Don’t wait until we send our enforcement unit to come to your premise to take what is due,” he added.
The Finance CEC also put on notice advertising agents with arrears to pay up before legal action is taken against them, saying that City Hall loses millions of shillings from such advertisers.
“We have 26 advertisers but only three have paid their dues. We are supposed to collect around Sh2 billion but we only get Sh700 million. I will focus on this area in the next few weeks,” he said.
REVENUE
Meanwhile, City Hall is set to fully digitise all its revenue streams by the end of April and stop cash payments for services.
Mr Makori said 97 out of the 126 major revenue streams have been digitised.
“You will not have to come to City Hall to pay for services; you will do it in the comfort of your home. Towards this, we are working on fully automating all our services by the end of next month,” said Dr Makori.
The Finance executive said the automation would ease the burden on Nairobi residents and improve revenue collection by sealing loopholes for loss.
He said digitisation has helped the county government collect more revenue every month with an increase of an average of Sh30 million posted every day. He said the county collected Sh1.6 billion in January and Sh1.7 billion in February.
“We have seen in the past few months that our revenue has gone up. We have sealed the loopholes that were there...by sweeping everything to Central Bank of Kenya, which has seen the revenue increase and [there is] more accountability,” Mr Makori said.
SOURCES
Single business permits is a major source of revenue to City Hall, raking in a monthly average of about Sh512 million. This is followed by land rates which records around Sh306 million every month, parking fees at Sh140 million and fire permits at Sh116 million.
Other revenue come from bill payments which recorded Sh110.9 million, construction permits raked in Sh61.85 million, rental income Sh49.78 million, health permits at Sh34.79 million, payments for market stalls recorded Sh8.28 million, while liquor licences brought in Sh2.52 million.
Dr Makori said that despite land rates and unified business permit (single business, fire certificate, medical health, food hygiene and signage) being top revenue earners for Nairobi County, only 43 per cent rate payers have paid for their licences.
