Kenya’s planned accidents

As a healthy, wealthy and wise man by many standards, the polygamous ex-senior chief Muganda not only believed in hard work, but trusted that there was enough work for everyone; that people who could not feed their families were just lazy.

Because of his stature, many people who considered themselves needy, or hungry, visited his homestead to either ask for favours or seek employment.

He would invariably send them away, telling those looking for favours to engage in economic activities or those seeking employment that they would not execute the tasks to his satisfaction.

It was a losing a battle, for these people would not listen or understand. They kept coming back no matter how hurtful the invectives he hurled at them were. Eventually he concluded that they were short of hearing or understanding.

To keep them away, he embarked on economic empowerment by employing the job-seekers or giving jembes to those who were looking for favours. In the event that they did not own land, he gave them parcels of land, and — let me indulge you a little — our village is inhabited by people who were originally from far-flung parts of Nyanza and Western provinces and even from Uganda!

What my grandfather did or his conclusion comes to mind whenever I hear that the Government of Kenya, directly or indirectly, is clamping down on reckless drivers through punitive measures, initiating Road Safety Campaigns or launching some amorphous Road Safety Awareness Week which I think Kenya in general and Nairobi in particular should have each week.

Road safety has become a cliché, an overused phrase, and like gender-mainstreaming, girl-child empowerment, corruption-free Kenya or zero-tolerance for corruption, is not understood by tens of millions of Kenyans who also cannot understand the numerous punitive Traffic Amendment Acts that the Executive, Legislature, Judiciary — and even the media — wrongfully think will curb deaths on our roads.

Road safety campaigns, curbing road accidents, road blocks, reducing road carnage are just tired phrases that put a lot of emphasis on “road”. The drives targeting reckless drivers, drunk ones and other careless road users are like awareness campaigns organised in cemeteries or crematoriums to teach the dead how to avoid accidents or contracting diseases.

As we blame corrupt law enforcement officers, non-trained (public service vehicle) drivers, ill-trained instructors employed in driving schools which bribe their ways through regulatory bodies, and a whole bunch of backroom dynamics, we still run campaigns that target the “dead” on the roads and fail to seek ways through which those willing to live can be empowered.

What is never realised is that the people we blame are victims of economic disempowerment, and as long as the gap between the excessively empowered and painfully disempowered continues to widen, deaths on Kenyan roads will not decrease. Law enforcers do not accept bribes as a sport, but because they receive a pittance and just want to make ends meet through any other way apart from their wages, not salaries.

Boda boda riders do not pay for riding instructions because they are in some get-rich-quick schemes. Similarly, driving schools’ owners cut corners because they want to make money as fast as possible.

The matatu madness would not have existed if loan repayment terms considered the economic situations of the investors and interest rates were not so high.

Granted, this is a capitalist man-sell-dog-meat society, but even then, there are basic regulations that we should follow and which can only be enforced with the creation of a less uneven economic playing field.

If not, we will end up with a vicious cycle of poverty, and, by inference, more deaths on the roads in our quest to make profits or even curb road carnage.

Currently, corporations in collaboration with some GoK-related entities are exhorting us to SCREAM at road carnage, but, economies of large scale poverty aside, the chief executive officers behind this campaign are yet to mention that the problem starts way, way back in our primary schools, driving schools, homes, in our narrow minds, and in the rotten electoral, political, banking and educational systems.

We have long been taught that traffic lights — the ones we have should be in the museum anyway — are just but decorations, zebra crossings are just paintings meant to distract us from other pedestrian concerns, driving schools are business institutions, driving tests are routine exercises which need not be passed and safety is just a meaningless word, a foreign concept like tourism, good customer care, properly-brewed coffee and good mannerisms.

Let’s break it down and face the harsh reality. How many of the corporate bigwigs and other nabobs behind the SCREAM road safety campaign own transport firms and extol their drivers when the returns are high without caring how many lives they endangered or were lost due to their driving?

How many of them discourage their employees from bribing their way through police checkpoints or border crossings? How many of the bosses and their employees know the colour of the cover of the Highway Code and how many have bought or even read it?

Isn’t it odd that GoK has never considered translating the Highway Code in to local languages? Tellingly, at the launch of the SCREAM campaign, not even an image of the Highway Code was displayed nor were road users even asked to get copies and familiarise themselves with the basic road rules or mannerisms.

We need to understand that economic empowerment will go a long way in helping us build a more cohesive nation, and even help in curbing the unnecessary deaths on our roads.

Our roads are full of many hungry, poverty-stricken and economically disempowered people who only think of how to make ends meet. They do not have time to listen to, and understand all these meaningless road safety campaigns, because, as my grandfather used to say, jakech onge ithe (a hungry person is short of hearing and understanding).

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Whether Obama wins or not is a moot point for us

Euphoria, with an upper case E, will kill more Kenyans than the ignorance of all local politicians combined.

We get giddy at the slightest opportunity and fail to see the bigger picture.

That is how or why when the current United States President Barack Obama came to Kenya when he was a senator, all sorts of brickbats were thrown at him because he discredited our religion, Corruption.

When he won the elections, our “leaders” fell over themselves to congratulate him, we earned a public holiday and GoK delegations went all the way to the US to watch his inauguration on TV.

All “youthful” politicians who had no chance in hell of becoming presidents of even Sunday school boards likened themselves to him as if Obama just decided one day that he was running and got elected 24 hours later.

Political analysts, our television talking heads, took to the airwaves to declare that “Obama will visit Africa during his second term,” without knowing whether he was going to win that second term or not.

A few months later, Obama visited Ghana and Egypt. Our numerous tourism marketing bodies were busy talking about how the Obama Wave will make Kenya the most preferred destination in the world.

Well, in 2011, the city of Cape Town received more tourists in six months than the heavily-marketed Kenya did in three years. Even the Barcelona Football Club museum did better than us last year.

For the several months that Obama has been campaigning, Kenya’s journalists who are so used to quoting unnamed political analysts even when they are just reporting from the scene of a road accident, have been telling us that “analysts say that Obama’s failure to visit Kenya during his first term raises questions”.

What are these questions and what was Obama supposed to come and do?

In the meantime, our “youthful” politicians have been getting their pants in twists, probably waiting to start likening themselves to him if he wins the US elections.

If Obama makes just a single remark about their shenanigans, they will bleat — while on their way to buy cough syrup in the US and genuflecting at USAid — about Kenya being a sovereign state which can handle its own issues.

Compared to our wimpish leaders, Obama is on top of his game, and if anything, in the US, all politics is local. Even if we declare a public holiday tomorrow when Obama wins, American leaders do not care!

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A bunch of dirt

Oh dear, these food- or health-related studies will be the death of Kenyans. It seems nothing that we eat is safe anymore.

So now, some scientists have more or less concluded that Nairobi’s sukuma wiki, and naturally other vegetables, are unfit for human consumption because they “have organisms associated with faecal matter.” Bluntly put, they are full of raw sewage.

Chin up Nairobians, that raw sewage is largely responsible for that exquisite taste of Nairobi’s kachumbari or salsa — depending on where or whether you are having nyama choma or flame grilled steak — which you so much love.

Burp!