The agonizing wait for families at the site of the collapsed building in South C, Nairobi, has turned into grief. Rescue teams working through the night have retrieved the lifeless body of one victim from the rubble of the seven-storey structure that came tumbling down on Wednesday.

The recovery confirms the worst fears of the community: that the "unsafe" warnings issued by the National Construction Authority (NCA) were not just bureaucratic red tape, but a prophecy of death. As the excavators dig deeper, the silence from the trapped victims is deafening.

The Rescue Operation

A multi-agency team led by the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) Disaster Response Unit has been working for over 24 hours. The retrieved body, that of a middle-aged man believed to be a construction worker, was pulled out shortly after 9:00 PM EAT.

• Trapped Souls: At least three other people remain unaccounted for. Families have camped at the site, braving the cold and the dust, praying for a miracle that seems increasingly unlikely.
• The Cause: Preliminary investigations confirm that the building, originally approved for four floors, was illegally extended to seven. The foundation simply snapped under the unauthorized weight.
• Impunity: "We saw them adding floors at night," a neighbor told reporters. "We reported it to the county, but the officers came, took envelopes, and left."

A City in Mourning

This tragedy is a grim reminder of the "concretization of corruption" in Nairobi. Every stone moved by the rescue team exposes not just a broken building, but a broken regulatory system. For the family of the deceased, the cost of cheap housing has been paid in blood.