TITLE:
Construction Management Capacity and Regulatory Compliance in Documented Building Failures: Three Decades of Kenyan Records, for Nairobi County
AUTHORS:
Hilary Kiprono Murrey, Cyrus Babu Ong’ondo, Daniel Wekesa Nyongesa
KEYWORDS:
Structural Safety, Building Collapse, Construction Management Capacity, Regulatory Compliance, Case-Only Design, Firth Penalised Regression, Nairobi City County
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Civil Engineering,
Vol.16 No.3,
September
3,
2026
ABSTRACT: Building failure remains a persistent cause of avoidable death and capital loss in rapidly urbanising African cities, yet the empirical literature has tended to treat it either as a technical problem of design or as a governance problem of enforcement, rarely examining the two explanations against a common physical outcome. This study recodes, from first principles, the national register of documented building failures compiled by the National Construction Authority of Kenya for the period 1990 to 2019. The register lists ninety-one rows, one pair of which duplicates a single incident, giving ninety distinct events; thirty-two are located in Nairobi City County. Each event was coded against eight pre-failure deficiency indicators under a rule that admits only conditions the register names, and the complete coded dataset is published as an appendix so that every statistic can be reproduced from the public source. The design is a case-only analysis of buildings that failed. It can describe the composition of the documented failure record and estimate correlates of the extent of failure conditional on a failure having been documented, but it cannot estimate the probability that a standing building will fail, because the register contains no non-failed buildings and no exposure denominators. Structural safety was operationalised as the extent of failure, distinguishing collapse of the primary structural frame (64 events) from localised failure of a secondary element (26 events). Within Nairobi records, poor workmanship is the most frequently named condition, at 59.4 per cent; against the rest of Kenya only inadequate maintenance is significantly more prevalent (21.9 versus 5.2 per cent, p = 0.031), while a pre-failure compliance breach is named in 37.5 versus 10.3 per cent of records (p = 0.005). Across the national failure corpus, substandard materials is the only indicator associated with escalation from localised defect to frame collapse (OR = 5.07, 95 per cent CI 1.09 to 23.61, p = 0.025); it retains that association under adjustment in a pre-specified reduced model and under Firth penalised estimation across all eight indicators, but it does not survive correction for multiple testing. The models explain between 10 and 16 per cent of the variation in failure extent and classify no better than the majority class, which is itself a finding about how little a short-form incident register records. All multivariable results describe the national failure corpus and not Nairobi City County specifically. Enforcement response is treated throughout as a post-incident governance outcome and is excluded from the compliance index and from every model of failure extent; no such response is recorded in 53.3 per cent of documented failures. The findings support targeted attention to material certification and to the maintenance of the occupied stock, and they identify the absence of a matched non-failed comparison group, and the thinness of recorded attributions, as the two principal barriers to any statement about the occurrence of failure.