On 8 June 2026, Kenyans gathered to mourn. Not a person, but a place. They came for a funeral procession for Nairobi National Park, the world’s only national park inside a capital city, gazetted in 1946 and now facing yet another bite out of its protected land. What began as a planned silent march soon found its voice, the grief giving way to chanting as the crowd swelled.
At the heart of it is a plan by the Kenya Wildlife Service to build a new animal orphanage and a parking facility inside the park, in an area its own management plan designates a low-use zone because of how ecologically fragile it is. KWS insists this is a conservation investment. The people who walked on Monday do not believe them, and the facts give them good reason not to.
A project that cannot keep its own story straight
Start with the most basic question anyone should be able to answer about a development inside a national park: how big is it?
No one in authority seems able to say. As Kenyans were being arrested over this land, news outlets reported its size variously as 75 acres, 76 acres, and 89 acres. The proposed parking capacity has swung just as wildly in the project’s own documents, from 150 vehicles to 1,300.
This is not a rounding error. If the authorities cannot tell us how much of the park they intend to take, or how many cars they intend to bring into it, then no one has honestly measured what this project will cost the ecosystem. And an Environmental Impact Assessment that was never released for public comment cannot be said to have measured anything at all. Public participation that does not meet the legal threshold is not participation. It is a formality performed for the record.
You cannot relocate an ecosystem
Defenders of the plan suggest the wildlife will simply move, that the orphanage can sit here as easily as anywhere, that a corner of a park is a small thing to give. It is not.
Nairobi National Park is not a building you can put up somewhere more convenient. It is a living system assembled over decades, a migratory corridor, a balance between species that took generations to settle. In the last ten years it has already lost land to the Standard Gauge Railway, the Southern Bypass and the Internal Container Depot Road. Each loss was small on its own. Together they are how a park dies, quietly, a slice at a time, until there is nothing left to defend.
A parking lot can be built almost anywhere. An animal orphanage can be sited on land that is not a protected wildlife park. A 90-year-old ecosystem cannot be put anywhere at all. That asymmetry should settle the matter. It keeps being ignored.
Punishing the people who raise the alarm
What happened after the procession should trouble every Kenyan, regardless of where they stand on this single project.
As demonstrators gathered, police moved in and arrested a number of them, among them former Chief Justice David Maraga, who had joined in solidarity. Maraga was detained at Lang’ata Police Station and then refused to leave until the colleagues held alongside him were freed.
Think about what that image says to the country. A man who once sat at the very top of our judiciary, detained for standing up for a national park. Citizens who came to grieve a place they love, treated as a threat to public order.
This is the second front in the assault on our environment. It is not only the land that is under pressure, but the right to speak up for it. When peaceful demonstrators are arrested for raising their voices, and when journalists who report on these projects are pressured to look away, the message is unmistakable. Raise the alarm and you will pay for it.
But a country that criminalises concern for its own heritage is not protecting order. It is protecting the people doing the taking. Silencing the watchman does not make the house safe. It only makes the theft easier.
We are down, but we are not out
It would be easy to read all of this and conclude the fight is already lost. It is not.
Ngong Road Forest was saved when Kenyans refused to stay quiet. Karura still stands because people, led by the late Wangari Maathai, were willing to be beaten rather than back down. Every reversal we have won has come from ordinary citizens deciding that a forest, a park, a river was worth defending out loud.
So to the Kenya Wildlife Service, and to every institution entrusted with our natural heritage: shelve this construction. Release the full assessment. Let the public it claims to serve actually be heard. And to every Kenyan who loves this park: stay loud. Document what you see. Show up to the public participation forums they hope you will miss. Defend the people arrested for defending the land.
The park cannot speak for itself. We can. And as long as we do, the procession does not have to end in a burial.
It can end in a fight we win.
Iconic Kenyan forests making up almost 10 times the size of Nairobi are under threat.
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