A view of the Nairobi city skyline. Urbanisation changes the levels and speed with the economic development.
In this first instalment of our new weekly series on living in Nairobi, John Kamau revisits how an ambitious 1970s real-estate vision symbolising urban order in middle-income neighbourhoods was sabotaged.
This was meant to be the future. Donholm, Tena, Tassia, Savannah — names that today summon images of gridlocked roads, vertical sprawl and spewing sewers — once stood for Nairobi’s most ambitious vision of urban order.
When conceived on paper, these Eastlands estates were not cautionary tales, but symbols of hope: carefully planned middle-income neighbourhoods with drainage systems, schools, clinics, walkways, and dignity.
At the heart of that dream stood Joseph Goldberger, a little-known Israeli engineer with outsized ambitions and a fondness for classical music. Backed by Kenya’s post-independence elite, he set out to reimagine Nairobi’s eastern frontier.
Nairobi skyline on December 31, 2023.
His vision was not merely to build houses, but to craft neighbourhoods — havens where teachers, clerks, and civil servants could escape the squalor of the slums and live securely, with dignity, in serviced, proud communities.
He had the land. He had the blueprints. He had the political cover: none other than Harun Muturi — known as ‘Meta’ — a flamboyant gemstone dealer and stalwart of President Jomo Kenyatta’s inner circle, who stood beside him as co-director.
Muturi moved with the confidence of one who dealt not just in precious stones but in power itself.
Buoyed by that closeness, Goldberger trusted all would be well. But then it all unravelled — not under the roar of a bulldozer, but at the quiet stroke of a pen. Three cheques. Worth Sh50 million. Signed in trust. Lost in silence.
The year was 1978, when Mzee Kenyatta died. What followed wasn’t just the collapse of one housing project but the slow erosion of Nairobi’s faith in physical planning.
Kenya's first President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta.
From Buruburu to Umoja, from Pipeline to Dandora, the city turned its back on infrastructure-first development and embraced something darker: speculation, informality, and political expedience.
This is the story of how Nairobi surrendered its blueprint—and what it cost.
When Goldberger died in 2000, few Nairobians remembered his name. But everyone knew the chaos in Donholm, Tena, Umoja, Savannah and Pipeline: Estates once conceived, on paper, as urban sanctuaries had become monuments to neglect; patchwork roads, tangled power lines, broken drains.
From the records, it seems that Goldberger wasn’t just a developer, he was a planner with a purpose. At a time when Nairobi still had space and optimism, Goldberger saw Eastlands as the city’s next great leap; middle-class, organised, dignified.
Residents and vendors go about their businesses on a street full of garbage in Pipeline estate, Nairobi County in this picture taken on August 13, 2024.
Triumph
When the first homes in Buruburu were handed over in the mid-1970s, it was a triumph of post-independence planning.
Built with funding from the World Bank, and guided by the Ministry of Housing and the Nairobi City Council, Buruburu was designed as a middle-income residential estate for civil servants, teachers, and small-scale professionals.
Everything had been planned—roads, water supply, sewerage, shopping centres, schools, and green spaces. The houses, uniform and modest, came with titles. For a brief moment, Buruburu represented what Nairobi could be: orderly, inclusive, and self-sufficient.
This was the dream Goldberger hoped to replicate and scale. But where Buruburu had the discipline of government planning and international oversight, Goldberger’s estates had political entanglements and commercial risk.
When Goldberger and Muturi needed money to actualise their dreams – they walked into the National Bank of Kenya, which offered them a lifeline: Sh85 million to develop housing on the Doonholm land. A resolution passed on November 3 authorised Goldberger and Muturi to personally guarantee the loan. Days later, NBK issued a confirmation letter—Ref. AKN/vmm/11/6678—approving Sh70 million in new credit.
Goldberger was informed that the entire amount owed had to be liquidated within two years, using proceeds from the sale of the Doonholm houses. That directive was outlined in a letter dated November 9, 1978, which was also copied to M/s Waruhiu and Muite Advocates, the bank’s legal representatives.
Before this letter was issued, both Goldberger and Muturi had visited the National Bank of Kenya to negotiate what they described as an “overdraft” of Sh85 million. As security, they surrendered the title deed for the Doonholm land to NBK to back two debentures.
Then things took a dramatic turn—catastrophically so.
Troubling details
After signing the agreement with the bank, Sh80 million was credited to their current account. But that raised a troubling question: was this money a loan, or was it a partial payment for the 814 houses that the bank was booking – or wanted to buy? Buried in the paperwork was something far murkier.
Stanley Munga Githunguri
Before the ink dried, NBK’s executive chairman, Stanley Munga Githunguri, allegedly proposed that Sh50 million from the loan be placed in an interest-bearing account. Goldberger agreed and returned to NBK’s Harambee Avenue office with his manager and the company cheque book.
There, he wrote out three cheques totalling Sh50 million, payable to individuals and firms with no clear link to the project—including Jenkinson & Parekh, a company previously mentioned in a 1966 maize scandal. Goldberger didn’t get any receipt. No deposit slip. No written confirmation. Just Githunguri’s word. Then, the money disappeared.
As a result, Continental Developers could not build the 815 houses it had promised to NBK. The infrastructure plans stalled. Teachers, civil servants, and middle-class families who had booked plots were left with little more than pegged land and promises.
As roads remained unpaved and sewer lines not laid, desperate plot owners began constructing on their own— chaotically and without regulation. City Hall watched the rise of urban chaos, unconcerned.
In court, where the matter finally ended, Justice Alfred Simpson presided over the financial wreckage. He noted that the Sh50 million vanished without any proper accounting, remarking that it was “very difficult to believe that Mr Goldberger and Mr Muturi would pay out Sh50 million to strangers merely on a verbal promise.” The court was not swayed by the fact that cheques bore Githunguri’s initials.
Behind closed doors, the court discovered even more troubling details: part of the Doonholm land, where the houses were to be built, had been quietly transferred to Tassia Coffee Estate Ltd, a firm 90 per cent owned by Githunguri himself.
Effectively, NBK was financing a private deal in which its chairman stood to benefit. The housing units NBK was to buy were to be built on land the bank’s own chairman had transferred to himself.
By 1980, with the loans unpaid, the damage to the project was irreversible. Then, the National Bank of Kenya demanded full repayment. Goldberger’s accounts were debited with interest on the loan—including the mysterious Sh50 million. As the debt ballooned to Sh127 million, Goldberger’s vision collapsed under the weight.
Tena Sacco, also known as Teachers of Nairobi Association, never received the promised houses. The land, hived as Tena, was hastily subdivided into unserviced plots. With no roads, no sewerage, and no oversight, families began constructing ad hoc homes—piecemeal and unregulated. Informality took root, and planning died in silence.
Land grabbers entered into the expansive land and laid claim. In the chaos, some fishy land-buying companies emerged and double allocations ensued in parts of the land. The chaos was infectious and soon, the bug reached the organised Umoja Estate which also collapsed.
As Goldberger quietly left for Tel Aviv, aided by fellow Freemasons, Muturi, shattered and betrayed, turned to alcohol. The grand vision of building Nairobi’s future had ended in betrayal and bankruptcy.
More crisis
Elsewhere, the National Housing Corporation, once tasked with shaping orderly urban growth, has long been sidelined by private developers.
City Hall’s planning department, once a hub of professionalism, became a ghost of its former self—undermined by decades of corruption and political interference.
What Nairobi lost in the Goldberger affair wasn’t just Sh50 million or 814 homes. It lost its faith in planning. It surrendered its blueprint.
The Donholm episode didn’t just bankrupt a developer—it bankrupted a model for building a city. The dream of neighbourhoods with storm water drainage, walkways, clinics, and schools was replaced by gated cages, gridlock, and guesswork. The land meant to uplift Nairobi’s middle class became its planning graveyard.
Even Buruburu, the estate Goldberger once hoped to mirror, eventually collapsed.
Cows cross the road in Buruburu, Nairobi, on October 19, 2021.
By the 1990s, Buruburu — once Nairobi’s most disciplined middle-income housing estate — began to strain. What started as minor renovations spiralled into unchecked vertical extensions, perimeter wall encroachments, and illegal commercial conversions.
Under Kanu’s single-party rule, City Hall became a political tool. The Moi-appointed Nairobi City Commission, which had replaced the elected County Council, was answerable not to residents but to State House.
It turned a blind eye as powerful individuals violated building codes with impunity. Names such as Fred Gumo, the Nairobi City Commission Chairman, Kuria wa Gathoni, the Town Planner, and Zipporah Wandera, the Town Clerk, became associated with this era of mismanagement.
Extensions went up overnight. Gardens became kiosks. Balconies were converted into butcheries and salons. Whole maisonettes were split into cramped tenements.
Zoning laws became meaningless. Politicians who were meant to protect the city’s integrity instead traded permits for loyalty, turning planning into patronage.
If one were to write the obituary of Nairobi’s physical planning, it would begin in 1978, when an attempt to organise urban settlement collapsed and was replaced by chaos.
The result? Buruburu’s infrastructure collapsed. Its water lines now groan under a population several times larger than intended.
Roads designed for quiet, residential life are overrun by matatus and (now) boda boda. The estate that once symbolised disciplined urban design now serves as a cautionary tale of Nairobi’s entropy.
Umoja 1 alike
The same story was replicated in Umoja 1. Initially, Umoja I laid out in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a government-led extension of the Buruburu concept, was to cater for low-to-middle income earners, especially public servants and teachers.
Its grid-like planning, numbered courts, street lighting, and shared social amenities gave residents a sense of order and security. For years, Umoja I stood as a working model of structured, affordable housing.
A googlemap of Tena estate in Nairobi.
As Goldberg’s Tena project collapsed, Umoja followed suit. By the late 1990s, Umoja was overwhelmed by the same forces that were bringing down Buruburu. Political neglect, a failing city council, and rapid urban population growth collided.
Like elsewhere in Eastlands, private developers and landlords began to bend the rules. Rental bedsitters mushroomed as extensions. Public utility spaces were grabbed. Sewer systems clogged, roads decayed, and open spaces vanished beneath rows of iron-sheet kiosks.
Soon, Umoja’s once-pristine courts were indistinguishable from the unplanned outskirts of Kayole or Dandora. A planned estate had been overtaken by informal sprawl—state abandonment etched into every leaking tap and broken culvert.
Today, Eastlands is a monument to state failure. Once-lauded housing estates like Donholm, Buruburu, and Umoja now sit on a continuum of decay.
The National Housing Corporation, once central to shaping Nairobi’s growth, is now sidelined by private capital and political interference. City Hall’s planning department, once a technical engine of development, was turned into a shell—its decisions held hostage by informal payments and patronage networks.
Nowhere is this failure more visible than in Pipeline Estate, Dandora, and Kayole—once planned as part of Nairobi’s urban expansion strategy. In Pipeline, flats rise 10 to12 storeys high on plots meant for single-family units, packed wall-to-wall with barely a metre between them. Sunlight and ventilation are luxuries; even fire engines can’t access most buildings.
Dandora, home to the city’s largest dumpsite, was supposed to be a model low-income estate with waste management systems—but now sits choked by informal structures and environmental neglect. Kayole, once a hopeful fringe settlement, has become a sprawling concrete maze of unregulated apartments, overstretched sewers, and a collapsed road network.
These are not just urban slums—they are the natural end of planning abandonment, where concrete multiplies faster than rules can catch up.
What Nairobi lost in the Goldberger affair wasn’t just Sh50 million or 814 homes. It lost its faith in planning. It surrendered its blueprint.
The dream of neighbourhoods with storm water drainage, clinics, walkways, and schools was replaced by gridlock, guesswork, and gated cages. The land meant to uplift Nairobi’s middle class became its planning graveyard.
