The JKIA Toilets

Kipkoech Tanui (Standard):

It was dirty and congested and the cubicles were so small, I wondered if a Chicago burger-lover could get past their doors. In fact, it was easier to enter the toilets in reverse, not only because they are tiny, but the door is so close to the toilet seat there is no room to turn once you are inside. Worse still in this era of terrorism and drug trafficking, unless you are with a trusted friend, it is inevitable that you will have to get into these mini-toilets with your suitcases. Woe unto if you are running against time because your brakes are almost failing; it requires time and scientific accuracy to get the bags in but out of the way, fast enough to do your thing. I thought I was the only one worried about the state of JKIA just from looking at the toilets, until I read Sunday Nation columnist Sunny Bindra’s piece: One of the secrets of national success — clean toilets published last year. In case you missed it, someone has laminated a copy and hang them inside the toilet cubicles in Nakuru’s Westside Mall.

Here, the toilets are clean, spacious and suffer no congestion. So you can comfortably read Bindra’s piece to the end.

He started by quoting a professor published in the Havard Business Review, on what he thought brought about Singapore’s economic success.

“Have you seen our (spotless clean) toilets at Changi Airport? ...That’s our competitive advantage,” is how he answered.

Bindra aptly summed up the lesson from Berkeley’s Prof Vinod Aggarwal: “On the other hand, if you can’t get toilets to be clean, you are very unlikely to be able to have standards, processes and cultures that allow you to do anything very well. Hygiene is a basic human necessity. Not getting that right does not set a correct foundation. It also sends a very bad signal to a visitor, and is suggestive of further bad experiences to come.” Now let us leave the toilets in Nakuru and go back to JKIA. How often are the water hydrants tested? Obviously they have fire drills, but when was the last time the hydrants were deployed? Then why have they not moved over to automatic water sprinklers?