Knee-jerk and ad hoc solutions will never reduce road carnage in Kenya

Some bureaucrats at the Police Headquarters, the Ministry of Transport and some nascent outfit called the National Transport and Safety Authority must be busy celebrating their great achievement in dramatically reducing road accident deaths over the festive season.

They can trot out statistics demonstrating that fatalities caused by night-time road accidents dropped sharply once restrictions were placed on long distance buses and matatus operating after dark following a series of calamities in the run-up to Christmas.

The aforesaid officials should shelve their orgy of self-congratulation. They achieved nothing at all except to demonstrate penchant for knee-jerk solutions based on neither rhyme nor reason.

If buses and matatus are banned from operating at night, it follows that they will not cause any accidents at night.

Take that argument to its logical conclusion, and we should now ban public service vehicles operating during the day because we are still witnessing death on our roads in broad daylight.

After that we will ban all trucks from operating day and night, and if road fatalities accidents don’t end, private cars and all other forms of motorised vehicles will be forever banished from our roads.

Voila, with a few runs of the Kenya Gazette we will have achieved the miracle of coming from one of the top road death tolls in the world to zero accident rate.

The point is that instead of drawing up serious policies and ensuring their implementation, we offer instant solutions that do little to halt the carnage.

We have a whole slew of laws, rules and regulations that, if implemented and enforced by a competent authority, would dramatically reverse the horrendous traffic genocide we now take for granted.

Instead, officials cover up their own inadequacies by introducing, with much hoopla, yet more laws and bureaucracy that soon fall into disuse after the initial excitement has died down.

Today it is curbs on night operations of public transport and trucks. We also have the breathalyser back and being enforced with great zeal, despite little evidence that drunk driving is the biggest contributor to road carnage. I can bet my last cent that all those truck, matatu and bus drivers who kill scores in their moments of madness are usually stone-cold sober.

And we also have lined up in the next few weeks mandatory installation of new high-tech tachometers to replace the existing speed governors in public service vehicles and heavy commercial vehicles. And this when the authorities have resolutely refused to ensure that the current gadgets work.

Then, wait for this one. Another edict that bus and matatu passengers will no longer pay their fares in good old Kenyan currency notes and coins … only electronic money will do in digital Kenya. I wonder how that will contribute to road safety?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not canvassing for the operators losing money with the curbs on night driving. I’m not talking about the travellers being inconvenienced. This is not about the costs transporters have to bear for new gadgets.

And it’s not sympathy for drunk drivers; you can lock them up alongside all other road maniacs and throw away the keys.

This is simply about the ad hoc reactions reminiscent of Nyayo-era roadside policy declarations. We have a serious problem of road safety, let’s deal with it.

In the meantime, I wonder whatever happened to that once respected voice on all matters to do with our roads. The Automobile Association of Kenya used to offer premium solutions on matter of road safety, but seems to have gone blind, deaf and dumb ever since releasing that seminal study in the late 1980s identifying “An absence of manners” as the biggest killer.

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It is, indeed, churlish of politicians in Luo Nyanza to start complaining about the largesse Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero is sharing in that part of the country.

The governor has obviously identified a need, and there is no law which says that taking harambee fund-raisers to Nyanza amounts to undermining the regional political kingpin, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga.

However, Dr Kidero was elected governor of Nairobi. I wish he’d spare some of his loose change for those who voted him into office. But obviously, he has wider ambition.

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