The public alarm over the proposal to hive off a bit of Uhuru Park for the construction of a major highway from the JKIA to Westlands, Nairobi, is understandable.
This is one of the few remaining significant green patches in a capital city fast becoming a concrete jungle. For a clean and healthy environment for residents, protection of the few ‘lungs’ is paramount.
In the 1990s, an epic battle was fought over Uhuru Park by the iconic environmentalist, Prof Wangari Maathai, against the then-ruling party Kanu.
Her spirited but largely single-handed campaign against the tough regime of President Daniel arap Moi saved the park, which she paid for with having to endure choice insults.
This enhanced her stature as an environmental crusader. Ironically, the whole country felt proud when she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her conservation efforts in 2004, just seven years before she succumbed to ovarian cancer.
Excising even an inch of this prime spot will be desecration of Maathai’s legacy and all that has been associated with the icon.
It must not happen. This is not because the road project is not essential; it’s a key infrastructure project the government has committed itself to execute and is expected to have a huge positive impact on the development programmes that are required to take the country to its next logical level.
The road is expected to ease the traffic congestion that contributes to the wastefulness that makes a mockery of the efforts to develop our major towns.
But it does not make sense to destroy what we have painstakingly built or preserved over the years.
As has happened before, we cannot be sure that by ceding the supposedly small piece of Uhuru Park for the road project we will not open the floodgates.
This park in the centre of the capital is too precious to be destroyed for anything. It must be left intact.
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