1.5m People at Uhuru Park? Tell it to the chickens!

 By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

25 October 2015

I will repeat this as many times necessary: It is NOT possible to fit one million people at Uhuru Park!

I was prompted to re-state this fact by a story that appeared the Daily Nation on Monday, September 19. The heading proclaimed: “1.5m Catholics set to attend Pope’s mass”.

The reported sizes of crowds at Uhuru Park have been growing in the last 12 years. It all started in 2003 during the inauguration ceremony of Mwai Kibaki as president of Kenya. At that time, several media houses put the number at 100,000.

Then there was the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) campaign rally in 2007 when the figure of 400,000 was bandied around. After that came the “Baba When You Were Away” gathering organised by ODM. This one was claimed to have attracted one million people. Now we are told that 1.5m will attend the Pope’s mass!

I don’t get surprised when a political outfit exaggerates the number of its followers; but a church… So I read the Monday story a few times over to find out where the figure of 1.5 million came from. The writer does not say; he only mentions that the faithful are expected to come from “the 20,000 Catholic Church mass centres across the country”.

The last time I discussed the question of one million people gathering at Uhuru Park (June 2014), I demonstrated the logistical nightmare walking to the venue. I showed that the crowd would fill all the major inlet roads to the city and walk continuously for 24 hours.

Now, the news report is talking about 1.5 million people coming from all over the country to attend the Pope’s mass. In this case, we expect that they will be brought to Nairobi in buses. So, how many will be needed?

Let’s assume they will be in 50-seat buses: 1.5 million divided by 50 is 30,000. Where will they be parked? Each bus measures about 10m by 3m; that is, 30 square meters.

Assuming that they are parked touching one another leaving no space in between, the 30,000 buses will need 900,000 square metres of parking space. But that’s not realistic!

About 2m must be left between the buses, so, we need to add one metre to each dimension. That is, we work with 11m by 4m. This brings the area per bus to 44sq.m and therefore the total space required is 1.32 million sq.m.

Let us now convert that into units that most people are familiar with – acres. One acre has about 4,000sq.m, so 1.32 million sq.m is equal to 330 acres! Do you think we can get that much parking space in Nairobi?

Let me make this crystal clear: the capacity of Uhuru Park is about 50,000. In fact, the Safaricom Stadium at Kasarani can hold a lot more than Uhuru Park. So, next time you hear some one talking about one million people, ask them to get tell it to the chickens!