11 Missing in Eastleigh Building Collapse. The Regulator Named the Builders, Not Its Inspections.

Eleven people were still missing on Saturday morning, a day after a building under construction collapsed on 9th Street in Nairobi’s Eastleigh district, its basement and ground floor already rented to shops. The National Construction Authority has since named the developer, the contractor, the architect and the structural engineer registered on the project, with their licence numbers and the project’s registration number, recorded on July 30, 2025.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen said 67 workers were on the site when it came down at about 1 p.m. on Friday; 66 got out and one was injured. The 11 unaccounted for were inside an electronics shop, a butchery and a grocery trading in the basement and on the ground floor. The Kenya Red Cross said two injured people had been pulled out and taken to Kenyatta National Hospital, and Murkomen said rescuers had made contact with some of the survivors still trapped inside. Relatives of the trapped phoned them in the first minutes after the collapse and later could not reach them; a tent at the site takes the names of the missing. No authority has issued a confirmed death toll. Governor Johnson Sakaja said at the scene on Friday that it was possible “one or two” people had died, which was an estimate given while the digging had barely started.

Joseph Kaula, a plasterer working on the fifth floor, told the Associated Press he was the last person to walk out. “The whole area was filled with dust,” he said. Nairobi police chief Issa Mohamud said more than 10 upper floors were under construction and warned the fallen building was leaning against its neighbour, which could also come down. Police are looking for the building’s owner. Heavy equipment was slow to reach a site hemmed in by other high-rises, and rescuers began with excavators and poles stripped from trees before sniffer dogs were brought in for the night work.

The National Construction Authority registered the project on July 30, 2025, as a proposed development on plot LR 36/11/40 in Kamukunji Sub-County, and gave it registration number 53128815710410. Sakaja said the building had been approved for construction. What it never received was an occupation certificate, the county document that makes a building legal to enter, and the governor said the shops had no temporary authorisation either. “Before anybody gets an occupation certificate, you’re not allowed to get into that property. At all. Even on a temporary basis. That is not allowed,” he said. The fine for this class of illegality, Sakaja added, is KSh5,000, less than $40. “When you enforce, you find a fine of Ksh5,000. And that does not deter anyone from continuing with an illegality.” Nairobi County has written to the Director of Public Prosecutions asking for its city courts to be given these cases.

The authority’s statement, signed by its acting executive director and registrar of contractors, Susan Rutto, and posted on X, lists 9th Street Plaza Limited as developer and Stromax Holdings E.A Limited as contractor, licence 41669/B/0618. The project architect is named as Emmanuel Mwangi Maina, registration A2045, and the structural engineer as Joseph Muturi Mugu, registration A2750. Registration is the step that records who is responsible for a project. It sits alongside a separate chain — county departments clear the drawings for public health, fire safety and structural soundness before construction, and an occupation certificate closes the file at the end — and it is not an inspection. The statement assigns no cause and no fault, and on the authority’s own part in the file it is silent: the Eastleigh Voice noted that the NCA did not indicate whether it had inspected the building before the collapse, whether any violations had been reported, or whether enforcement action had been taken against the project.

Eastleigh is the second under-construction tower to fall in Nairobi this year. On January 2, a 14-storey building under construction collapsed in South C, across the city. The Architectural Association of Kenya examined that project afterwards and found its National Construction Authority registration had been issued before the Nairobi County and National Environment Management Authority approvals that were supposed to come first. No equivalent sequence has been published for the Eastleigh project. Its approvals, in order, have not been released.

In March, between the two collapses, the president of the Institution of Engineers of Kenya, Shammah Kiteme, told Spice FM that follow-up after buildings were marked unsafe “continued to lag,” even though the National Construction Authority and county inspectors can issue stop orders. “The developer initiates everything, and if they refuse to pay professionals or attempt to cut corners during the approval phase, the entire project is compromised from the start,” he said. Kiteme proposed a national building register, modelled on the vehicle records system, where any tenant could check whether a building had been designed by registered professionals and issued a certificate of occupation. No public register of the kind he proposed exists. His warning had figures behind it: a national audit that sampled 14,895 buildings marked 10,791 of them unsafe for occupancy, to be reinforced or demolished — 72 percent of everything sampled — and a further 4.8 percent, roughly 715 buildings, were classed as very dangerous.

Bibiye Mahmoud, president of the Institution of Engineering Technology of Kenya, was at the Eastleigh site on Friday. She said the contractors and engineers responsible for a project are supposed to be supervised by qualified professionals, that most are not, and finished: “There is no accountability.” John Ogallo, vice-president of the Institution of Engineers of Kenya, said residents had reported cracks and other signs of distress in the structure before Friday. Mohamud said the owner and whoever authorised the building could both face charges. “Whoever is the owner, whoever authorised the building, all of them may be charged appropriately, but that will come after thorough investigations are done,” he said.

The National Construction Authority said details of the rescue, the site and the multi-agency team’s actions “will be shared in due course,” and gave no date for its preliminary investigation. The search ran through Friday night with sniffer dogs and excavators, and on Saturday morning the official figures had not moved: 11 missing, two rescued, no confirmed toll.