WEEKLY HIGHLIGHT

Waziri takes 'Two Bulls by the Horns'

It has been one of the busiest weeks for the County Executive Committee (CEC) member for Lands, Mining, Physical Planning, Housing and Urban Development Raymond Kinyua; who has recently taken over as the CEC for the Department of Environment, Water, Irrigation, Climate Change and Natural Resources, in acting capacity. Singling out last Tuesday as the 'Day of the Week', this is what he says, verbatim:

Proceedings in the 1st meeting

"Tuesday morning I held two consecutive meetings. One was a meeting about Development Control Approvals and Development Control Enforcement. As a county, we've not been doing very well, especially on enforcement of development controls within our municipalities and urban areas. And we have since organized the department in a way that we are going to ensure our standards are held in terms of construction, in terms of building approvals. We have our entire process; we have started the process of digitalization. As of now, we are doing manual development control approvals and enforcement. And soon we are going to go to the media to inform members of the public. We are going to have an advert in the local dailies. We are going to have myself and my team talking about what is supposed to be done by developers so that they can get the right approvals. We also intend to be very particular to quality. So a team of engineers, a team of physical planners will be getting down to urban areas within the next one month and to ensure and to enforce the development control standards. So we have those two committees and I have met them and we have agreed on the flow of the process. We have also agreed on the responsible people and what should be done in order to ensure that people comply with development standards. 

After that meeting, I got a courtesy call from the Managing Director (MD) at EWASCO, Nancy Macharia was accommodated by the chair of Embu-Mbeere Water and Sanitation Company (EMBEWASCO), Mr. Jackson Njama.

The 2nd meeting in progress

We, together with the Engineer Gatuta who is the Director for Water and Irrigation, discussed a wide range of issues, including the challenges the Water Service Provider (WSP) is facing and how the department can support them to enhance service delivery and provision of water, especially in the lower regions. We are still going to continue working together with our WSPs. We are still going to continue ensuring that standards for buildings, standards for sewer, standards for horizontal development are upheld," he concluded.