The rain does not arrive gradually in Kenya. The floods that hit Mathare, Mukuru, and Kibera follow a logic that has parallels across the Horn, where governments face mounting cost-of-living pressure and cities have grown far faster than the infrastructure meant to support them. Kenya's disaster is distinctive in its causes, but its political economy is recognisable across the region.
This is not a rare event. It is Kenya's annual catastrophe. Every long rainy season, broadly March to June, floods kill hundreds, displace tens of thousands, and destroy livelihoods that take years to rebuild. Every year, officials express condolences, pledge action, and wait for the dry season to restore normalcy. And every year, it happens again.
The question that demands an honest answer is not why Kenya floods. It is why Kenya keeps dying from floods that are entirely predictable.
What made recent floods so deadly
The 2024 long rains season was catastrophic by any measure. More than 300 people died across Kenya, over 200,000 were displaced, and forty of Kenya's forty-seven counties reported flood impacts. The single worst event was the Mai Mahiu landslide in Nakuru County on 24 April 2024, when a dam burst sent a wall of mud and water through a low-lying area, killing over 50 people and burying homes completely. Survivors described walls of water arriving with almost no warning.
In Nairobi, the Mathare, Mukuru, and Kibera settlements flooded repeatedly. In western Kenya, rivers in Kisumu and Migori counties burst their banks, inundating farmland and homes. On the coast, Mombasa and Kilifi recorded flash floods that swept through market areas. The Kenya Meteorological Department had issued warnings. In most affected areas, those warnings produced little effective evacuation or preparation.
The immediate cause was rainfall. The underlying causes are more complicated, and more damning.
Three layers of a man-made disaster
- Structural: Nairobi was designed for a city of 350,000. It now holds over 5 million. The drainage infrastructure, storm drains, culverts, river buffers, was never extended to match the city's growth. Informal settlements built on riparian land, riverbanks legally required to remain clear, house an estimated 60 percent of Nairobi's population. There is nowhere else for them to go, and successive governments have never built the affordable housing that would provide an alternative.
- Climate: East Africa's rainfall patterns have become more extreme and less predictable. The Indian Ocean Dipole, a climate phenomenon that influences East African rainfall, has intensified in warming conditions, producing rainfall events that are heavier, more concentrated, and arrive with less lead time. The 2023–2024 El Niño cycle was one of the strongest in decades and drove rainfall well above historical averages across the region. This is not random weather variation. It is a climate signal, and it is getting louder.
- Political: Kenya's Disaster Risk Reduction framework exists on paper. The National Disaster Management Authority has a mandate, a structure, and a budget. What it has historically lacked is the political will to enforce riparian clearances against communities with nowhere to go, to compel county governments to maintain drainage systems, or to prioritise flood mitigation in budgets where other pressures feel more immediate. Early warning systems exist but the "last mile", the communication chain that reaches a family in Mathare at 2am, repeatedly fails.
The riparian land problem, and why it is not easily solved
Kenyan law requires a 30-metre riparian reserve on either side of rivers, land that must remain clear of development to allow floodwater to spread and slow. In Nairobi, this law is almost universally violated. The Mathare River, the Ngong River, the Nairobi River, all have dense informal housing built to their edges, and in some stretches, over them.
Successive governments have periodically announced demolitions of riparian structures. These operations are politically toxic and practically complicated. The families being evicted are not wealthy developers who chose riverbanks for scenic value. They are the urban poor who built where they could afford, often with tacit government approval, on land allocated through informal networks, because the formal city had no room or provision for them. Demolishing their homes without resettlement is not flood mitigation. It is displacement dressed as disaster prevention.
A genuine solution requires the government to build affordable housing at scale, resettle riparian communities in stages, and enforce clearance rules prospectively. Kenya has announced such programmes repeatedly. The Affordable Housing Project under President Ruto is the latest iteration. Its implementation against the scale of need remains contested, and the units delivered so far fall well short of what a city of five million requires.
Climate change is accelerating the timeline
What was once a twenty-five-year flood event, a rainfall total so extreme it was expected to occur once a generation, is now arriving every five to ten years in parts of East Africa. The models are consistent: warming Indian Ocean temperatures drive more moisture into East African weather systems; the rainy seasons become shorter but more intense; and the window for effective preparation narrows. Kenya's meteorological service has improved its forecasting significantly, but accurate forecasts only reduce deaths if the institutional chain between forecast and community action works reliably. It often does not.
The 2024 Mai Mahiu disaster illustrated this failure precisely. The dam involved had been identified as a risk. Local officials knew the area was vulnerable. The rain that caused the collapse fell over a period that should have triggered emergency protocols. The gap between knowing and acting, that gap is where people die.
What accountability looks like, and what it has looked like
After every major flood season, Kenya's political response follows a recognisable sequence. The President visits affected areas and directs relief. The Interior Ministry coordinates emergency response. Parliament holds hearings. Reports are commissioned. Occasionally, county or national officials responsible for drainage maintenance face scrutiny, though rarely consequences. The reports from 2015 floods, the 2018 floods, the 2020 floods, and the 2024 floods make strikingly similar recommendations: enforce riparian zones, upgrade drainage, improve early warning communication, invest in affordable housing. The recommendations accumulate. The floods return.
Civil society organisations, including the Kenya Red Cross, Amnesty International Kenya, and a range of community groups, have pushed for stronger accountability. Families of victims have filed legal challenges against county governments for failing to maintain drainage infrastructure. These cases move slowly through a court system that is not well suited to systemic disaster accountability.
What would actually change things
The honest answer is that changing Kenya's flood death toll requires sustained political commitment over a decade or more, not a single emergency response. The components are known: a serious and funded affordable housing programme that makes resettlement from riparian zones possible; drainage infrastructure investment at county level with performance accountability; a last-mile early warning system that reaches informal settlement residents in real time; and a climate adaptation strategy that treats more intense rainfall as the baseline, not the exception.
None of this is technically complicated. All of it is politically difficult in a system where budgets are stretched, patronage politics distort spending priorities, and the communities most at risk have the least political leverage. The poor of Mathare did not choose to live on a floodplain. They live there because Kenya's urban development left them nowhere else. Until that underlying condition changes, the rain will keep coming and the houses will keep washing away.
Kenya is a middle-income country with the institutions, the technical capacity, and the international partnerships to solve this problem. The missing ingredient is not knowledge. It is the sustained political will to treat the lives of its poorest citizens as a priority that outlasts the news cycle.