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Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen said seven people remained missing after the collapse of an 18-storey building under construction along 9th Street in Nairobi’s Eastleigh area on October 23. The minister, who toured the site alongside Public Service Cabinet Secretary Geoffrey Ruku, reported that 67 construction workers had been present with 66 escaping unharmed and one sustaining stable injuries that required hospital treatment. Eleven shops operating on the ground floor and basement prompted immediate concern for potential customers or traders inside, according to the interior ministry briefing. Murkomen added that rescue teams had made contact with some of those trapped beneath the rubble and expressed hope they could be brought out alive.
A multi-agency team comprising the Kenya Defence Forces, National Police Service, Nairobi City County Government, National Youth Service and Kenya Red Cross Society coordinated the search and rescue operation that continued into its second day. The Kenya Red Cross Society stated that two injured people had been taken to Kenyatta National Hospital while crews worked carefully to avoid using heavy excavation equipment that might restrict air supply to any survivors. Local media accounts indicated the site, squeezed between other high-rises, complicated access for responders who were cutting through metal and concrete by hand in places. Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja told reporters at the scene that the building held no occupation certificate, adding this had potentially cost lives.
“The contractors and the engineers are supposed to ensure that the works are followed by professionals. But most are not,” Bibiye Mahmoud, president of the Institution of Engineering Technology of Kenya, told AFP at the location. Officials have initiated a manhunt for the building owner and the National Construction Authority has identified the developer, contractor and registered professionals linked to the project registered in July 2025. Investigations will examine whether regulatory or professional violations contributed to the failure, the authority said in a statement. Murkomen urged anyone with missing relatives to contact the Kenya Red Cross emergency number 1199 to aid tracing efforts.
The collapse has renewed focus on a long-running pattern of building failures in Kenya. A KIPPRA policy brief documented 86 building collapses between 2009 and 2019 that caused around 200 deaths and losses above 2.4 billion Kenyan shillings. Nairobi accounted for the largest share of these incidents, the institute’s analysis found, with a 2018 National Building Inspectorate audit showing more than 77 percent of sampled structures classified as dangerous or unsafe. Such figures underscore the scale of enforcement challenges in rapidly urbanising areas.
National Construction Authority records attribute 35 percent of collapses to poor workmanship, 28 percent to substandard materials and 25 percent to flawed structural design. An engineering study covering Nairobi County from 1990 to 2019 identified similar trends, noting that pre-failure compliance breaches appeared in more than one-third of local cases. Experts have repeatedly called for stricter oversight of contractors and mandatory professional supervision on all projects to curb the recurrence. The current incident occurs against this backdrop of systemic vulnerabilities.
Search operations were expected to extend further as teams cleared debris layer by layer while monitoring the stability of neighbouring structures. The National Construction Authority indicated that details on the site status and multi-agency actions would be released progressively. Authorities have yet to confirm the precise trigger of the collapse but have pledged a thorough probe into all aspects of planning, construction and early commercial use of the premises.
