A backhoe loader empties garbage onto a truck at Muthurwa Market on June 10, 2023.
| Francis Nderitu | Nation Media GroupNairobi
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Muthurwa market chaos that feeds city streets with hawkers
It is early Saturday morning and Frida Waithera is bending down to spread her ripe avocados over a white sack.
It is new stock she has just brought in. Next to her small shed where she sells avocados is a mountain of garbage. The stench is relentless.
A herd of 10 cows, which arrives here every day at 7am, rummages through the rubbish.
Like a weaver bird, the cows eagerly pick out edible material such as avocado seeds and rotten cabbage.
"All the rubbish from the market usually ends up here. If you stay here for a while, you get used to it. We are not afraid of anything," she says as she persuades us to buy the fruit.
On this day, a truck and tractor from Nairobi City Council are clearing a mound of rubbish that has piled up above the dump.
Besides the 36-year-old, several other traders have set up shop near the dump.
Ms Waithera is one of hundreds of small traders who arrive at Muthurwa — Nairobi's largest market — as early as 5am to get the best fruits to sell to other small traders arriving at the market.
She moved to the market in 2018, hoping to make a living after losing her menial job in Nairobi's Buruburu neighbourhood, but the harsh business conditions at the market have made her reconsider her decision.
The Sh700 million Muthurwa market, built during the era of the late former president Mwai Kibaki, was meant to solve the problem of hawkers encroaching on the central business district (CBD).
It was designed to be a 24-hour market with some basic facilities such as water, toilets, a hospital, a banking hall and administrative offices. But a look at the market reveals that such adjectives for the market began and ended on paper.
Instead, Muthurwa seems to have encouraged exactly what it was meant to end.
Walking down Landhies Road, it takes a few seconds to realise that you have descended into an area where lawlessness thrives.
Unlike the CBD, where you encounter a county askari every few metres, here there are only a few traffic marshals.
The fences protecting the buffer zone seem to have come down and the grass has dried up.
A few pedestrians make their way comfortably through the buffer zone to escape the oncoming vehicles.
A few shoppers coming down from the market have also taken advantage of the situation and parked their cars in the buffer zones.
Landhies Road is now a crowded mess as vehicles, pedestrians and traders jostle for space. The vendors, who now occupy half the road, the pedestrians and the vehicles all seem to be in a hurry.
Workers erect sheds for hawkers on Turkana Lane on June 10, 2023. The Nairobi City County Government has been modifying a number of lanes in the city to create space for hawkers to sell their wares off the streets.
Pedestrians rush to cross the road, much to the annoyance of a Forward Travellers matatu driver who hoots at them several times. However, one pedestrian signals him to be patient. The driver seems irritated.
A young man, who appears to be from the interior of the country, is engaged in a bitter exchange with a vendor after accidentally stepping on a cucumber the vendor had laid out on the ground.
A few metres away, a crowd gathered around a man with live cockroaches. He is demonstrating the effectiveness of his chemical combination, which he says kills cockroaches in seconds.
"We usually sell it for Sh200, but today you can get it for only Sh50, you cannot get it anywhere else," he shouts into a loudspeaker as an excited crowd swarms around him.
The hundreds of hawkers along Landhies Road should have been given stalls inside the sprawling Muthurwa market. But it is difficult for them to get a stall because they say it is too expensive.
"You cannot get a stall inside the market and the conditions are not good and they are very expensive. We came here because this is where a lot of people come and go," says Derrick Otieno, one of the vendors.
A walk of shame
Everything in Muthurwa seems to be failing to serve its purpose, creating this pandemonium. Take, for example, the sprawling footbridge that spans Landhies Road. It was supposed to prevent unnecessary traffic jams and accidents.
It has now been taken over by street families who have made it their home. A visit to the footbridge on Landhies Road reveals its dilapidated condition. A walk across the footbridge is a walk of shame. Human waste is strewn all over the footbridge. The open defecation poses a danger to the street children who live on the open bridge.
"It has been abandoned, there is no one who dares to use this footbridge. They would rather fight and cross the road than risk being robbed. It is very dangerous, especially at night, because there are no lights," says a trader who sells shoes nearby.
Collusion between tax officials
But the problem with Muthurwa market goes deeper. Through several interviews, Nation.Africa has established that the market is controlled by a cohort of county revenue officials. These officials, we were told, collect part of the cess fee from traders, take their cut and remit the rest to the county government through the Nairobi Pay platform.
City residents walk past tents set up along the public open space at the Kenya National Archives on Tom Mboya Street on June 10, 2023.
After taking a cut, the officials share the money with the market managers and some county officials.
Nairobi City County Chief Officer for Trade, Markets and Cooperatives Godfrey Akumali acknowledged that the problem was rampant and that the city government was making efforts to address it.
"It is a big problem that many merchants do not want to use the Nairobi Pay platform. For some reason, they have decided to give someone the cash instead of paying through the platform. The county usually takes disciplinary action and we are carrying out sensitisation on the Nairobi Pay platform to solve the problem," Mr Akumali told Nation.Africa.
He also said the county is baffled by the fact that traders want to pay someone, yet they are required to pay through mobile phones.
"These traders themselves have Pay Bill numbers and Lipa na M-Pesa. We created Nairobi Pay because it is easily accessible on mobile phones, but they do not want to use it. It is a problem and we wonder why someone would choose to give a person cash instead of transferring it through the platform," he added.
A young man carries a crate of tomatoes at Muthurwa market on June 10, 2023. Vendors at the market have appealed to the Nairobi City County government to remove the piles of garbage from the market.
It was also revealed that some unscrupulous people rent out the stalls on the pretext of using them, but later sub-let them at a higher price. Some of the traders said they pay between Sh7,000 and Sh8,000 for a stall, while those who rent from the county government pay only Sh1,000 a month.
City Hall said it was in the process of solving this mess by issuing notices to vendors for unoccupied stalls and later handing them over to those who deserve them.
According to Gibson Muchami, a long-time trader in the market, the problem of garbage is one of the common challenges. There is only one dump where all the waste from the market goes. It is often full and poses a great danger to the traders in the market.
"This dump is always full and we are afraid for our health. The NMS had plans to build another dumpsite, but the project has now been abandoned. What we want is better services because we pay revenue to the county," says Mr Muchami.
Growing markets
In response to our queries, City Hall also said that the problem of encroachment along Muthurwa is a big one and that the county is addressing it by building 20 markets across Nairobi.
"It is very difficult to get up and relocate the hawkers along Landhies Road because it is their livelihood. We are not living on an island and we are human beings. What we want to do is to ensure that these hawkers are relocated to these new markets because we do not want to affect their livelihood," said Mr Akumali.
The Governor Johnson Sakaja-led administration also said most of the markets were overcrowded, making it difficult for them to achieve a high level of cleanliness.
"We have solved the problem of garbage in the markets because we have contractors on the ground. The markets are clean, but the level of cleanliness is not up to par because they are overcrowded. It is a process we are working on gradually," he added.
The Nairobi City County Government has also seen a decline in revenue from these markets, despite an increase in the number of markets.
In the third quarter of the 2022/23 financial year, the county recorded an increase in revenue of Sh4.5 billion, but the market revenue has performed poorly. The sector recorded revenue of Sh78.5 in the first three months of 2023. This is a decline of Sh22.6 million from the previous quarter.
Mr Akumali, however, said the poor revenue performance was due to the reduction in market fees during the Covid-19 pandemic.
