NAS should reign on Nairobi addressing bug

National Addressing System adds efficiency to the delivery of mail

Nairobi could soon feel like London, New York. Thanks to the National Addressing System. But the ambitious addressing system has to overcome its teething problems. 

Walk along any street of Nairobi and one thing will stand out: every building carries an addressing insignia. Those traveled far and wide cannot help compare the ease in navigating the streets of Nairobi to that in First World cities. However, in that excitement, one could fail to notice that some buildings have more than one address. 

NAS assigns buildings conspicuous green addressing labels. On these labels are legible numerals identifying each house and the street where it is located. The premise of the addressing system was to facilitate ease of identifying the ever-growing city properties. 

Instead of relying on the names of buildings, NAS makes it easy to use numbers to identify buildings found along any given street. This system, a brainchild of Universal Postal Union, UPU, makes it easy to identify a building in a given street and tell its proximity to other buildings in the same street. 

For instance, the address for Bazaar Plaza along Biashara Street is ‘01 Biashara Street.’ From this address, one can easily guess that this building is on either of the extreme ends of Biashara Street. Therefore, it is utterly confusing that some city buildings have two different addresses. 

In Nairobi, some buildings have two different addresses. Anshi Plaza along Biashara Street, for instance, has labels for ‘05 Biashara Street’ and ‘38 Biashara Street.’ The inherent confusion flies in the face of making the navigation of the city easy.

No. This is not about buildings sitting on two streets carrying different addressing labels on each on different facades. 

In bilingual countries using a similar addressing system, buildings carry two labels bearing similar numbers, only in different languages. In Morocco, for instance, buildings carry insignia done in French and Arabic.  

The case of NAS in Nairobi is inexcusable. It needs redress. 

One can only hope that the resulting disarray with the NAS is short-lived, and that someone is working to reign on it. Otherwise, it challenges the very logic behind the mooting of the National Addressing System. It makes it arduous to navigate the streets of Nairobi.