Tenants evacuated as posh Peponi apartments near collapse

Five families living in the posh Peponi View Apartments have been given seven days to leave or risk being affected by cracks that have appeared in their houses.

It all started with a post on social media, where users shared a 31-second clip of houses on the verge of collapse after excavation work was carried out on a nearby plot. 

On Tuesday, the wall separating the Peponi View Apartments from a nearby plot where construction was taking place reportedly began to crack after excavation work began on the site.

A 2019 Facebook post referencing the apartments listed the five-bedroom units at Sh85 million to buy and Sh300,000 per month to rent for the five-bedroom, all en-suite units.

On Thursday evening, the Nation found that officials from the National Environment Management Authority (Nema) had arrived on the scene to assess the situation, accompanied by the Kenya Red Cross team. 

Officials from Nairobi City County also arrived and marked the five buildings with X signs, as well as two other flats nearby, indicating that the developer and contractor had failed to comply with regulations.

Fortunately, no one was injured or killed in the whole scenario, but tenants said they were concerned about the situation.

"Today was just a precautionary measure and to confirm that there were no injuries... a multi-agency team will also be here tomorrow for the next operation, including the Nairobi County team," said a Nema official who didn't want to be identified.

He said the first thing they did when they arrived in the area was to ask the tenants to leave immediately.

By the time we left, four families had moved out and one was in the process of doing the same. 

But the tenants blamed the district administration and the developers for failing to follow due process, which almost cost lives.

"Even before that, the developer was told to rebuild the wall, but because of the dilly-dallying, they have not even decided to rebuild the wall yet... if they had built the wall to the required standards, we certainly would not be in this mess," said one of the tenants.

The neighbouring developer was also blamed for failing to backfill, which exacerbated the situation and made the weak walls unstable.

The tenant said he had lived there for almost six years without any problems until the developer from the neighbouring site started building. 

"I feel frustrated. If the developer had done his job, we would not be in this situation. Hopefully this is a wake-up call for the developer to start rectifying the situation, it is something that can be rectified, but the more the delay, the more the headache."

Efforts to get comment from the Nairobi County Executive Committee member in charge of the built environment and town planning, Mr Stephen Gathuita Mwangi, were unsuccessful.

However, the county assembly's planning committee chairman, Mr Alvin Olando Palapala, admitted that his team had received some complaints about irregular approvals of some buildings in Nairobi and were looking into the matter. 

Mr Palapala said the acting county secretary, Mr Patrick Analo, had informed him of the situation at Peponi View, but that he was also on another assignment related to the matter.

"I have been on other assignments where people have also made complaints, so we had gone to Eastleigh to look at the problem before making our findings," Mr Palapala said, assuring that they will leave no stone unturned.

This comes amid ongoing investigations by the County Assembly Planning Committee into who is approving the buildings.

Mr Analo is also the Chief Officer in charge of Urban Development and Planning.