When Codes Fail: Building Regulation, Enforcement, and the Human Cost of Non-Compliance

The collapse of Manzil Towers in Nairobi on 2 January 2026, a 14-storey building under construction that pancaked in the early hours of the morning, killing two security guards and triggering a six-day rescue operation, is a tragedy that should not have happened. It is also, the evidence suggests, a tragedy that was entirely foreseeable and is precisely the kind of event that the CAA’s Survey of National Building Codes in the Commonwealth was designed to address.

Published in late 2024, the CAA’s Survey of National Building Codes, undertaken through its Knowledge Sharing Partnership with member organisations across the Commonwealth, identified the failure to design, implement and enforce built environment legislation as one of the key barriers to sustainable urbanisation across the Commonwealth.

The survey findings paint a sobering picture of systemic weakness:

• Several Commonwealth countries still lack a mandatory national building code, or operate with fragmented and outdated codes
• Code development is typically a central government function, but implementation falls to local authorities, creating a structural disconnect between policy and practice
• Around two-thirds of countries surveyed lack mechanisms to update existing buildings to current standards
• Only 41% of countries engage built environment professionals fully in code development; 6% have no professional engagement whatsoever
• Across ODA countries, building control inspections, certification and enforcement are generally considered inadequate
• Just 11% of ODA countries have a mandatory energy code; a significant barrier to meeting climate commitments

Perhaps most tellingly, the survey found that nearly half of respondents consider their building codes unfit for purpose, and 30% view their planning policy similarly.

The Manzil Towers collapse illustrates what happens when multiple regulatory systems fail simultaneously.

The building, developed by Abyan Consulting Limited, was approved in December 2023 as a 12-storey mixed-use development on Kiganjo Avenue, South C, under Kenya’s Physical and Land Use Planning Act (No. 13 of 2019). By the time it collapsed, it had reached the 14th floor, two storeys beyond its approved height. A stop order had been issued by the Nairobi City County Government in August 2025, but was allegedly ignored. Construction continued.

The Architectural Association of Kenya (AAK), in a detailed statement issued five days after the collapse, described the failure as a cascade: the National Construction Authority (NCA) had issued project registration before the developer had secured the required approvals from either the Nairobi City County Government or the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA); additional floors had been approved without documented proof of structural review or inspection of ongoing works; the client had acted as both developer and contractor, creating inherent conflicts of interest; and although site inspections and meetings had reportedly been held, no visit reports or minutes were produced.

“This was an avoidable incident,” AAK concluded; three words that carry the full weight of the survey’s findings made manifest.

In June 2026, Kenya’s Director of Public Prosecutions approved charges against more than 80 individuals, developers, engineers, architects, and county officials, spanning manslaughter, abuse of office, neglect of official duty, and commencing construction without an Environmental Impact Assessment licence. Among those charged is Patrick Analo Akivaga, the former Nairobi County planning chief.

The Manzil collapse is not an isolated incident. It sits in a longer, painful sequence of building failures across the Commonwealth and beyond that share a common pathology: the gap between what legislation requires and what enforcement delivers.

Earlier cases tell the same story. In Mumbai in 2005, the Sadaf Manzil, a century-old residential building, collapsed, killing 11 residents, despite having been inspected and passed by government engineers just three days before. The engineers were subsequently convicted of negligence. In Nairobi itself, the South C collapse is far from the first: a pattern of structurally unsafe buildings, ignored stop orders, and regulatory overlap between national and county agencies has long been identified by professionals and residents alike.

The CAA survey identifies the structural explanation: split responsibility between levels of government, inadequate professional input into code development and revision, and the absence of effective enforcement mechanisms at local level. The problem is not, in most cases, that codes do not exist. It is that the architecture of enforcement is broken.

That diagnosis was already on record in Kenya before Manzil Towers fell. In March 2020, the AAK published its Feasibility of Centralization of Development Control Systems in Kenya, a study that mapped, in detail, the multi-agency fragmentation at the heart of Kenya’s development control environment. It identified the NCA, NEMA, county planning departments, and a further nine national agencies as concurrent actors in the construction permitting process, with no single body able to enforce the full chain. The study found that 64 per cent of built environment professionals had negative experiences of the automated development control system, that approvals routinely took up to 24 weeks, and that corruption and political interference were identified as primary causes of delay. Six years before Manzil Towers collapsed, two storeys above its approved height, past an ignored stop order, with NCA registration granted ahead of the required county and NEMA approvals, the conditions for exactly that failure had been catalogued and published.

The same pattern — codes that exist on paper but fail at the point of implementation — extends beyond structural collapse to fire safety in schools. On 27 May 2026, a dormitory fire at Utumishi Girls’ Academy in Gilgil, Nakuru County, killed 16 students and injured 79 others. Eight students were subsequently arrested on suspicion of arson. But the investigation revealed that the circumstances went well beyond the alleged actions of those students: an emergency exit was locked during the fire, dormitories were overcrowded beyond approved capacity, and two members of teaching staff had reportedly been informed of a potential threat and failed to act. Kenya’s Education Minister Julius Ogamba confirmed that the school had failed to observe established safety rules. The school’s board of management was disbanded.

This was not an isolated school fire. Kenya’s deadliest school dormitory fire, in Machakos County in 2001, killed 67 students. In September 2024, a fire at Hillside Endarasha Academy in Nyeri County killed 21 students, with subsequent reports citing overcrowding and inadequate exits. In 2021, the Ministry of Education recorded 126 incidents of school arson between January and November of that year alone. A 2024 Ministry of Education assessment found that many schools failed to comply with fire-safety standards, identifying dormitories with barred windows, single exits, inward-opening doors, and overcrowding — a finding serious enough to trigger the closure of 348 schools. Whether the cause is deliberate arson, electrical fault, or accident, the lethality in each case is compounded by the same failures: inadequate exits, locked or obstructed escape routes, and overcrowding that turns a manageable incident into a mass casualty event.

In direct response to the Utumishi tragedy, the Architectural Association of Kenya published “Mulika Mjengo: Proposal for Safe School Dormitories in Kenya” on 28 May 2026 — the day after the fire. Authored by AAK architect Dr Tuesday Gichuki, the document sets out both the design and operational measures required to ensure dormitory safety. Its core standard is unambiguous: no dormitory should be occupied unless every child can escape quickly, safely, and without needing a key. Among the specific requirements the proposal identifies are at least two independent outward-opening exits with panic bolts; prohibition of external padlocking while students are inside; window grills fitted with internal emergency-release mechanisms; smoke detectors, audible alarms, and emergency lighting in every dormitory; maximum-occupancy certificates displayed and enforced; fire drills conducted at least once per term, including night-time simulations; and annual electrical inspections by qualified electricians. Critically, the proposal addresses governance as well as design: it calls for joint annual inspections by education, fire, public health, and building-control officers, a visible safety certificate for each dormitory, and mandatory closure of non-compliant facilities until defects are corrected. School boards are required to treat dormitory safety as a standing governance duty, not an administrative formality.

The AAK proposal underscores a point that applies as directly to school dormitories as to multi-storey residential buildings: design and operations are inseparable. A dormitory can be built to code and still become a death trap if emergency exits are subsequently padlocked for “security” reasons, occupancy limits are quietly exceeded, or fire drills are treated as ceremonial rather than substantive. The enforcement gap documented in the CAA’s building codes survey is not confined to structural integrity. It runs through every dimension of built environment safety, including the buildings in which Kenya’s children sleep.

In Kenya, the Architectural Association of Kenya has been among the most active professional bodies in the Commonwealth in attempting to address this enforcement deficit, not merely through advocacy, but through direct action.

AAK’s Mulika Mjengo initiative, launched in July 2023, is a public-facing reporting and inspection platform that enables citizens to flag unsafe or non-compliant construction activity. The name is instructive: “Mulika” means “shine a light on” in Swahili. The platform operates alongside a companion BuildHub portal providing citizens with accessible guidance on planning law and building regulations, addressing the transparency gap that the CAA survey identifies, where codes are frequently unavailable online and therefore inaccessible to the public they are meant to protect.

Mulika Mjengo is not a passive complaints line. AAK’s inspection team conducts independent site visits in response to reports, produces detailed findings, and publishes reports on the status of complaints received. Initial findings clustered non-compliance issues into four categories: regulatory violations, environmental degradation, public safety concerns, and community impacts.

Following AAK’s presentation of Mulika Mjengo findings to the NCA, the two bodies agreed to conduct joint inspections, with NCA undertaking follow-up visits to sites identified in AAK reports. More significantly, AAK has formally requested that its Mulika Mjengo team be embedded within the NCA’s Multi-Sectoral Agency Coordinating Committee under the National Building Inspectorate, a move that would give the initiative statutory standing alongside government regulators.

AAK has also built community partnerships with residents associations including the Kilimani Project Foundation and the Kenya Alliance of Resident Associations, working to build civic capacity to hold duty-bearers accountable. Its Annual *Je, Una Mjengo?* Campaign (“Do you have a construction project?”) promotes the use of professional services in building projects, addressing the demand side of the quality equation.

AAK President George Arabbu Ndege participated in the CAA’s 2024 CPD event on Making National Building Codes Work, reflecting the direct connection between Kenya’s lived experience of enforcement failure and the Commonwealth-wide policy debate the CAA is seeking to advance.

The 2020 Feasibility study is also instructive for its reform proposals. AAK’s preferred model — supported by 75 per cent of the professionals surveyed — was a centrally managed electronic platform linking all development control agencies, while retaining revenue and decision-making authority within the county governments: a one-stop-shop for applications without centralising power. Its five-stage implementation pathway began with “unbundling” the development control workflow to clarify which actor is responsible for which action at each stage, before any automation is attempted. The principle is worth underscoring: automating a broken system produces an automated broken system. What the Manzil collapse demonstrates is that the unbundling never happened. NCA registration, county planning approval, NEMA environmental licensing, structural review, and site inspection remained parallel and uncoordinated processes, each capable of proceeding regardless of the status of the others. The reform agenda the AAK identified in 2020 — sequential approvals with downstream agencies unable to register projects until prior approvals are confirmed, end-to-end digitisation with shared document access across agencies, and enforceable statutory timelines — maps directly onto the lessons the Manzil collapse has forced back onto the policy agenda.

The Manzil case, viewed through the lens of the CAA survey, points to several specific reforms that Commonwealth member associations and their governments should consider:

• Sequential approval systems need enforcement. In Kenya, the NCA issued project registration before county and NEMA approvals had been granted. No single regulatory change is more straightforward, or more consequential, than requiring that approvals be granted in the correct sequence, with downstream bodies unable to register projects until prior approvals are confirmed.
• Stop orders must have teeth. A stop order was issued for Manzil Towers in August 2025. It was ignored. The question of what mechanisms exist to enforce stop orders, and what personal liability attaches to officials who fail to act on non-compliance, is central to any credible reform agenda.
• Professional supervision must be documented. AAK noted that site inspections had reportedly taken place at Manzil Towers but left no documentary record. Routine compliance reporting, requiring consultants to file periodic progress updates with regulators, should be a baseline requirement.
• Approvals should be interim, not final. AAK has proposed that approvals be issued on an interim basis only, confirmed at practical completion after full compliance verification. This would fundamentally shift the burden of proof from pre-approval to continuous monitoring — a model that the CAA survey suggests many Commonwealth countries would benefit from adopting.
• Civil society has a role but cannot substitute for the state. Mulika Mjengo is an impressive and innovative initiative. But the fact that a professional association has had to create a citizen reporting platform and independent inspection service to compensate for statutory enforcement failure is itself a measure of how far the system has fallen short. Professional bodies can supplement regulation; they cannot replace it.

The CAA’s building codes survey, the UN-Habitat Legal Checklist for Cities developed with CAA’s Commonwealth partners and launched at WUF12 in Cairo, and the ongoing work of the Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Coalition together provide a policy framework within which the lessons of Manzil Towers can be translated into durable reform.

The charges now before Kenya’s courts are an important step towards accountability. But accountability after the fact is a poor substitute for prevention. What the survey makes clear, and what Nairobi in January 2026 made devastatingly concrete, is that the implementation gap between legislative intent and enforcement reality is not a technical problem. It is a governance problem, and it requires a governance response: stronger inter-agency coordination, clearer lines of professional liability, mandatory documentation of supervision, and the sustained engagement of built environment professional associations in the design, implementation, and monitoring of building regulation.

The two security guards who died in the rubble of Manzil Towers deserved better from the system that was supposed to protect them. So do the millions of people across the Commonwealth who live, work, and sleep in buildings whose safety depends on codes that, too often, are not enforced.

*The CAA’s Survey of National Building Codes in the Commonwealth is available at [commonwealtharchitects.org](https://commonwealtharchitects.org). The Mulika Mjengo platform can be accessed at [aak.or.ke/mulika-mjengo](https://aak.or.ke/mulika-mjengo).*

*The CAA works in partnership with the Commonwealth Association of Planners, the Commonwealth Lawyers Association, and UN-Habitat on built environment legislation and governance across the Commonwealth.*