Ezekiel Ochieng revisits the river back then
I had lived in Kibera since 1991 when I was still a young man; back then, Kibera was a good place both environmentally and economically. As the population increases, Kibera changes to the worst. Our rivers are no longer called rivers but sewage due to a lack of proper waste management and a sewer line. In 1991 this river was very clean, and we used to get drinking water from here, it also had various types of fish such as tilapia. The river source was a forest at a place that is now known as Raila village. Things started changing from 1996 to 1998 as the population increased in this area. Due to the increase in population, some people settled near the river and started polluting it by connecting their toilets to the river to flush the waste. This is what has led to this river turning into sewage.
Fatuma Mahmoud on why we should protect our water sources
As a community, someone should stand up and unite all the youths and the people in our community to make Kibera and the rivers clean. I am not happy with the state of the river at the moment. In the past, it was a tourist attraction site, but now people have settled and even built houses on top of the dam. The hotels that used to accommodate the tourists are no longer there. And they have been replaced with waste. We also had various fish, such as the mudfish, which are no longer there.
This dam and the environment started being polluted between 1996-1998. Some water weeds that look like the hyacinth that began growing in the dam prompted the people living here to turn it into a dumping site and the tourists to go away.
