Geoffrey Mosiria: The city's late night choirmaster is about to exit the stage. Or is he?

For the past two years or so, Geoffrey Mosiria has been on a one-man crusade against noise pollution, illegal dumping, reckless hawking and zoning violations. But unlike the bureaucrats of the past, Mosiria doesn't just file paperwork, he films the raids, inserts himself into the narrative, boasts of his exploits, posts the confrontations online, and lets the court of public opinion do the rest.

Camera savvy, and with a sickening knack to dramatise his late-night escapades, Mosiria became a ubiquitous figure in the backstreets of the city as he emerged from all corners, armed with a camera, a filming crew and an eagerness to kick up a verbal storm and turn the moment into a viral spectacle.

A TikTok-phobe, who shamelessly relishes the eyeballs and the torrential comments he amasses after a successful raid, Mosiria became a much-loathed character whose presence would evoke feelings of detestation and sometimes even repugnance.

"Kwa majina ni Geoffrey Mosiria..." he would annoyingly declare, before unfurling his tools of trade and causing a mini scrimmage, jostling his way around, elbowing his way through the crowd and staging a makeshift TED talk on environmental management and discipline.

After all, he was Nairobi's Chief Officer in charge of the Environment - a post he took up with considerable aplomb and much fanfare.

In the world of municipal enforcement, Mosiria's approach was unprecedented. He was more than just a county official; he was a showman, a street czar, a crusader and a late-night goblin out to kill the fun and drown the revelry.

With sheer aggressiveness and a penchant to square off with the crowds, Mosiria was the city's headmaster - the high priest of environmental righteousness and the chaplain of residential tranquility.

To his 1.5 million TikTok followers, Mosiria was a hero - a lone wolf restoring order to a chaotic metropolis. But to business owners and party-goers, he was a raving tyrant killing the city's nightlife economy for internet clout and self-aggrandizement.

Clean-shaven, tactical and dressed in that branded green Nairobi City County Government half jacket, Mosiria turned enforcement into a spectator sport, striking without warning and bulldozing his way through city premises in a modus operandi that slowly became a nuisance and a seething irritant.

Shuffling through the dim alleys, marching down parking lots and meticulously parading up a nightclub's pathway, flanked by gun-toting cops, Mosiria would whip out his decibel metre, quickly measure the establishment's noise levels and then broadcast it to a bored online audience, dutifully watching his TikTok 'Lives'.

To him, this was the perfect embodiment of his resourcefulness, and a fitting ode to himself; to his own assumed street efficiency. 

Despite the backlash from a people worn down by his theatrics and roadside recitals, Mosiria soldiered on, using his office as the perfect opportunity to hone his content creation skills, buttress his notoriety and grow his online presence exponentially.

A cursory glance through his TikTok timeline reveals a chaotic mishmash of disjointed noises, clashes with tenants, a dance challenge, late night ambushes, preachy environmental sermons and inglorious platitudes.

Back in July, in Nairobi's densely-populated Pipeline Estate, Mosiria's team recorded him as he berated tenants silently watching him from their scruffy balconies as he lengthily reprimanded them for turning their pathways into rotting filth, warning that he would soon start making arrests and initiating arraignments.

Both of those videos, which are now pinned on his TikTok page, have cumulatively amassed a staggering 7.3 million views - and over 393,000 'Likes'. 

His detractors have long dismissed his antics as mere monkey tricks from a man with an insatiable appetite for attention - despite the threats, the ambushes, the nightclub 'closures' and the fleeting exposés, nothing really noteworthy - or legally significant - has ever come out of a Mosiria raid.

Unperturbed, he continued making the moment about himself - his savviness, his practical solutions, his shrewdness and his assumed mass appeal.

A maverick at City Council enforcement, Mosiria fashioned himself into more than just his job description; he morphed into a pragmatic disciplinarian with an empirical approach and a rather nauseating Messiah complex

Now, the madness has come to a screeching halt as his boss, Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja, has moved him from that all-important docket to the less glorious Citizen Engagement and Customer Service.

It is still not yet clear what his boundaries on his new assignment will be but for a man so obsessed with direct connections with the city's populace, we may soon see him back in the streets, and this time, with a new shtick, a new gimmick and a new playbook.