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NEWS & CURRENT AFFAIRS

The Nairobian

Why we reject the national building code 2024 as it is

Opinion

By Nashon Okowa | Aug 18, 2024

Cordoned off Epsom View Apartment in Uthiru, Nairobi County that sank on May 07,2024. All tenants who lived in the building are accounted for. The building is said to have been marked by National Construction Authority but the owners ignored. [Denish Ochieng, Standard]

About three years ago, at the peak of discussions on what was then the national building code draft document, I wrote an article casting doubts on whether the National Construction Authority was capable of achieving a progressive building code for the 21st Century.

I postulated that the sector looked primely set to fall back into the rut of inertia and it was foolhardy to put undue hopes on the then ongoing ‘stakeholders’ engagements.

The proponents of the national building code unmistakenly, joyfully, made sure they fulfilled my bet – with precision. Our construction and real estate industry is cripplingly shackled by the ‘old guard’ thinking. This sector is firmly in the armpit of folks with outmoded ideas whose raison d’etre is to maintain the status quo to preserve their dwindling self interest.

This is no conjecture, just look at every regulation and amendment made in the construction industry in the last decade or so. Show me any that is boldly progressive to propel us forward.

You will struggle to find any, yet the sector has had plethora regulations and amendments. Most of them are suffocating boardroom regulations to preserve status quo and massage dusty frail egos. The recently launched building code is a classic example.

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First, I fully support the idea of a new building code. It is embarrassing that 24 years into the 21st century we are still using a building code of 1968. Why has it taken us so long to do one? Self preservation.

There are still people, mostly in government, with proprietary view to this sector. When NCA was doing the building code, I personally appealed to them to give the industry a progressive code. A building code that truly reflects the metamorphosis of our industry.

This sector has ballooned and blossomed over the last two decades, coupled with timely emergence of new professions to buttress it. The challenges we face in this sector today are cataclysmic requiring not just new way of thinking but also new personnel. How can a national building code fail to pronounce itself adequately on such imperative things? Status quo preservation?

A national building code that fails to recognise the critical role of construction project managers, construction managers, landscape architects, interior designers, technologists and environmentalists, is not worthy of any progressive country. And do not buy that lack of regulation baloney! I refuse to discuss it.

Save for a few glimpses, the new building code, like most regulations and amendments in this sector, is carefully premised on the old past dogma. What happened over the last couple of years is a gate keeping exercise funded by our taxes in the name of a national building code.

For this sector to move forward we will have to vigorously shake some sacred foundations. We need a thorough fumigation of all construction regulatory bodies.

We need a refreshed, bold and progressive mindset in this sector. Otherwise buckle up for more retrogressive regulations like this building code. Lawrence Summers puts it more aptly; “In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.” These ‘old’ folks won’t be the first.

-The writer is a construction and real estate expert