By Robert Otani.

Bogged down by decades of municipal neglect, the three million residents of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, have been forced to take up the provision of essential services such as security and garbage collection from an inept city council.

Once known as the city in the sun, Nairobi has in recent years seen a steady decline in council services, leading to choking mountains of uncollected garbage, especially in residential areas.

The capital has also become one of the most unsafe cities in Africa with gun-toting thugs roaming the streets in broad daylight and occasionally challenging the poorly paid and frustrated police to street fights. There is hardly a day on which the local dailies do not carry a report of mugging, car-jacking or even killings. The state of insecurity is compounded by the fact that Nairobi has become an important conduit for drug trafficking.

Two months ago, a bank heist stunned the nation. A six-man gang broke into the Nairobi branch of the Bank of India and, as they emptied the safes and drawers; and customers' bags and pockets, they sang hymns as casually as they would have done in church. Then they sauntered into a waiting car and drove away before police arrived on the scene.

The situation has become so bad that recently the business community mostly Asian, closed their shops and marched to the police commissioner Philemon Abongo's office to protest the state of insecurity and their vulnerability to thugs.

Water shortages and power blackouts are also a common phenomenon now in Nairobi. And while some residents go for months with dry taps and have to buy water from vendors, inflated water bills continue to pour into customers' homes every month. On top of it all, there is power rationing!

Since the 1997 general elections, the city's residents have been let down badly by their council. Instead of delivering the services, council officials have spent valuable time and energies on empty politicking and wrangling over leadership. Says one Western diplomat in Nairobi: "The undoing of Kenya is that there is so much politicking that there is politics even in politics itself."

Fed-up with the situation, the city's residents are now forming welfare associations to do what the councils have failed to do over the years. The novel idea is the brainchild of John Mills, a resident of Karen, one of the city's most up-market residential areas.

Two years ago, Mills galvanised the residents of Karen and the adjoining areas to form the Karen-Langata Residents Association to collect funds for the provision of essential services, including garbage collection. Other residential areas have followed suit. And where there are not enough funds to hire trucks, the residents do the garbage collection themselves.