Eastleigh Building Collapse: What Is Confirmed, What Is Disputed, and What Is Still Unknown

Three days after a multi-storey building under construction collapsed in Nairobi's Eastleigh area, the rescue operation is still going on — and the public record is a tangle of competing numbers. Some figures describe people pulled alive from the rubble. Others describe reports filed by worried families. Others still are claims in a political argument about who approved the building. They are not the same thing, and treating them as if they were has already produced misleading headlines. Here is what is confirmed, what is disputed, and what is still unknown.

What happened

The building, under construction along 9th Street in Eastleigh, collapsed on Friday, October 23, 2026. According to reports from the Associated Press, the structure had more than ten storeys under construction on a busy commercial street, and its floors pancaked. Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen said on Friday that 66 of the 67 construction workers at the site had escaped unharmed, with one injured, and that eleven shops on the ground floor and in the basement were occupied at the time of the collapse. Those shops, rather than the construction workforce, are where the missing are feared to have been.

What is confirmed: the rescues

The rescue count has risen as the operation has gone on, which is why older headlines and newer ones disagree. On Saturday, October 24, the Associated Press reported one man rescued more than 24 hours after the collapse and taken to hospital. The Kenya Red Cross then announced a second survivor, a pregnant woman, who was rushed to Kenyatta National Hospital, according to China Daily's report of the Red Cross update. By the third day of the search, Radio47, citing the National Police Service, reported that four people had been pulled alive from the rubble so far and rushed to hospital. That four-rescue figure is the latest reported by Kenyan outlets, and it is the one to use — while noting, as Radio47 does, that it comes from the police account of the operation.

Separately, the official missing figure fell as rescues were made: China Daily reported that the number of people officially reported missing had dropped to five from seven following the rescues. That five is an official missing count at a point in time, not a count of people confirmed trapped under the rubble, and it will change as the search continues.

What the Red Cross's 31 really means

The most misread number in this story is 31. The Kenya Red Cross recorded 31 missing-person cases, but its disaster officer Vincent Ochieng said the organisation was still verifying the reports, and that some workers may have left the site before the building collapsed. Two people reported missing had already been reunited with their families, he said, according to the Associated Press. In other words, 31 is a count of missing-person reports under tracing — not a count of people trapped.

The distinction matters because a later official update points the same way. According to Radio47, the Principal Secretary for MSMEs, Susan Mang'eni, said 47 people had reported kin missing at the Red Cross desk, but that 9 had already been linked to their kin — again, reports, not confirmed victims. Kenya Red Cross had also said on Friday that 26 people previously reported missing had been traced and accounted for. None of these tracing figures should be written as "31 trapped" or "47 trapped". They describe families looking for people, and a verification process that is still sorting out who was actually at the site.

What is disputed: the approval

The sharpest dispute is over whether the building had county approval at all. Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja has said the county only approved a change of use, in October 2024, and that the architectural plans for the proposed building — described in some reports as 15 storeys with a basement, and in others as rising to 18 floors — were never approved. Government spokesman Charles Owino has separately said the registered owner of the building was deceased, and that his family and another party were in charge.

Embakasi East MP Babu Owino disputes Sakaja's account. On Sunday, October 25, he posted a document he describes as the county's own approval: a Notification of Approval of Application under the Physical and Land Use Planning Act, dated February 13, 2024, for a proposed development of 35 residential units plus a restaurant, mosque and shops on Plot LR No. 36/II/40 along 9th Street, issued to Sakina Star Ltd. He has alleged that Sakaja approved the construction after collecting a bribe of Sh120 million. Sakaja, in turn, has said the document circulating online is fake, that the development application was made in November 2024 — months after the date on the document — and that permission to change a property's use is different from approval to construct a building. The bribery allegation is unverified, and the document itself does not by itself establish that money was paid or that a criminal offence occurred. What the February 2024 document authorised, and whether it relates to the collapsed structure, remains unverified.

What is disputed: the manhunt

The same pattern — two official-sounding claims that do not sit together — applies to accountability. The National Police Service said on Saturday that a manhunt had been launched for the building's owner and the contractor responsible for the site, according to Radio47. That sits uneasily with the government spokesman's statement that the registered owner was deceased. Both claims are attributed here rather than settled, because the public record does not yet reconcile them: the owner on paper, the developer on record, and the contractor are not necessarily the same person, and the police have not yet published findings on who is answerable.

For now, the honest summary is this: four people are reported rescued by the third day; the official missing count stood at five after the first rescues; the Red Cross's 31 and the later 47 are missing-person reports under tracing, not a trapped toll; and the approval and the manhunt are both contested. The investigation into the cause of the collapse is ongoing, and the search itself has not ended.

Related reading: Serbia's student movement wins a historic election and Will AI break the internet's old foundations?. Sources: China Daily on the second rescue and Radio47 on four rescued.