Imagine a Nairobi resident leaving Embakasi shortly before seven in the morning. Before leaving home, she discovers the water hasn’t arrived as expected.
On the way to the stage, she passes an overflowing garbage point, loses time where a damaged road narrows traffic, and watches a brief morning downpour turn an already difficult junction into something approaching a holding bay.
She does not pause to ask whether Nairobi County’s Environment, Water, Roads, Planning or Transport should carry the blame, because from where she stands all these inconveniences belong to the same city.
That ordinary experience offers a useful way of thinking about the person Nairobi should elect as governor in 2027.
City Hall must divide work among departments because administration requires specialization, but Nairobi’s problems have an irritating habit of ignoring those boundaries.
Garbage left beside a road eventually enters a drain; the blocked drain worsens flooding; floodwater damages the road, traffic slows; businesses lose productive hours, while households already paying for water face another expense in an already expensive city.
If a budget dispute or revenue problem delays a response somewhere inside City Hall, an argument between offices eventually arrives at somebody’s doorstep.
Governor Johnson Sakaja’s record deserves more careful treatment than election-season politics normally allows.
His ‘Dishi na County’ school-feeding programme is real and substantial, feeding about 300,000 learners daily, while the recently approved 2026/27 county budget increased its allocation from KSh700 million to KSh900 million.
Anyone hoping to replace Sakaja gains little credibility by pretending that his administration has done absolutely nothing.
How Nairobi Continues to Face Recurring Problems
Incumbency, however, comes with an uncomfortable rule. Problems inherited from previous governments eventually become problems against which your own government must show measurable progress.
Water illustrates the point rather brutally. In the tariff process for Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company, the Water Services Regulatory Board recorded non-revenue water at 54 per cent in the 2024/25 baseline and average supply at nine hours, with improvement targets stretching through 2028/29.
Put less bureaucratically, Nairobi loses an extraordinary amount of treated water before earning revenue from it, while many residents remain accustomed to rationing whatever reaches their taps.
Flooding exposes the same problem more visibly. Nairobi did not invent poor drainage during Sakaja’s term, and decades of uncontrolled construction, blocked waterways, waste disposal and inadequate infrastructure cannot fairly be deposited at the feet of one governor.
Yet governors are not elected merely to inherit problems sympathetically. Citizens elect them because they expect them to make inherited problems smaller.
The machinery underneath those services matters just as much. Nairobi’s KSh49.27 billion budget for 2026/27 was approved on July 28 after a difficult period of disagreement between the executive and the County Assembly.
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Financial Budget
The budget now directs substantial funding towards roads, drainage, health, education and ward projects across the city’s 85 wards.
Those figures may feel distant to a household waiting for water in Umoja or a motorist trapped beside a flooded road, but institutional disagreements rarely stay in committee rooms for long. They eventually become delayed services.
This is why the approaching gubernatorial contest should demand more from everyone seeking City Hall than another argument about who has failed Nairobi.
Sakaja must explain why another term would produce better results from an administration he has already had years to shape.
Those seeking to replace him carry a different burden, because criticizing an incumbent is considerably easier than demonstrating an ability to govern a complicated city.
They must persuade Nairobians that changing the governor would change something beyond the name on the office door.
A challenger may convince voters that Sakaja deserves to leave City Hall and still fail the harder test of proving the alternative can actually run the place.
The field remains fluid, with Babu Owino, Agnes Kagure, Ronald Karauri, James Gakuya and others positioning themselves while nominations remain far enough away for candidates to enter, withdraw or rearrange political alliances.
Ranking them this early tells us less than understanding the mood whoever wins will have to govern. Surveys this year have disagreed considerably about the shape of the race, though several have pointed to meaningful dissatisfaction with the incumbent.
That disagreement is useful in itself because it tells us the election remains unsettled, while dissatisfaction alone tells us nothing about whether voters will trust the eventual alternative to govern Nairobi better.
Also Read: Nairobi County to Freeze All New Employee Recruitment and Internships
Areas of Concern
Perhaps every serious gubernatorial candidate should therefore face a less glamorous examination than another manifesto launch.
Imagine four hours of heavy rain over Mathare. A drain blocks, several homes flood, a road becomes impassable, traffic diverts into neighboring streets, a health facility begins receiving affected residents, and a damaged water line creates another emergency nearby.
The useful question is what should happen inside City Hall during the next sixty minutes.
The governor should probably not receive the first telephone call, because an administration that requires the governor to discover every blocked drain is already failing.
What matters is whether somebody at Ward level identifies the problem early, whether responsibility moves quickly to the people capable of acting, whether Roads, Environment, Health and Water are working from the same information, and whether somebody can establish what has actually been done rather than merely what officials say has been done.
That is the kind of competence gubernatorial candidates should demonstrate before voters become impressed by speeches about making Nairobi world-class.
Campaigns offer another imperfect but useful clue. Running a campaign and running a county are obviously different undertakings, and success in one guarantees nothing about the other.
Still, the organization a candidate builds reveals something about how that person understands information, responsibility and coordination.
A politician asking to manage more than eighty wards should reasonably be expected to know what is happening across those wards without depending entirely on WhatsApp enthusiasm, inflated mobilization reports and whichever supporter happens to have the candidate’s telephone number.
Reliable information should move from a Ward to the candidate without becoming distorted along the way. Competing reports should be checked before decisions are made, recurring complaints should be visible, and somebody should know whether an assigned task was completed.
These may look like campaign questions before an election, but they bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the questions that determine whether governments function after one.
The winner in 2027 will inherit a living institution, not an empty office waiting for a clever new owner. County employees, unpaid obligations, contracts, MCAs, national agencies, political interests, court orders and old administrative habits will all report for work on the first morning after the celebrations end.
Any candidate who imagines that personal charisma will suddenly bend that machinery into obedience is preparing Nairobi for another familiar disappointment.
Tomorrow morning, our resident in Embakasi will open the tap again, walk past the garbage collection point, look at the sky before leaving home and calculate how much time the road will take from her day.
She neither knows nor particularly cares which county directorate failed to coordinate with another one.
City Hall may experience Nairobi through departments, budgets, and organograms, but the resident experiences the consequences together, and when election day finally arrives, she will reduce all of them to one vote.
This article was written by George Nyongesa, a lecturer of philosophy and logic at the University of Nairobi and Chuka University.
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