We need to take action now to halt this carnage on our roads

Friends and relatives view the bodies of their loved ones who died in a road accident, in Nyamataro village in Kisii County on July 12, 2016. Sadly, accidents claim the most enterprising people in our economy. PHOTO | BENSON MOMANYI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Now, according to the National Transport and Safety Authority, the number of people who have died between January 1 and September 20 has reached 2,180.
  • Yet, if you checked closely, you would notice that NTSA has carried out more crackdowns so far this year than it did the whole of last year.

When my uncle Joseph was 27 years old, he decided to marry. Having identified the love of his life, he went to see his potential father-in-law, a staunch mukorino from Naivasha.

When he came out of the meeting, however, he was a little unsettled.

For dowry, the man had asked for a lorry-load of stuff, including a water tank and a sufuria big enough to cook a whole goat in.

My uncle, a barber, realised that for him to afford the dowry, he had to diversify his revenue streams, as we say in the corporate world.

So he started a small business, travelling to Nairobi to buy clippers, which he would sell to other barbers in Nakuru.

He probably would have eventually raised the money he needed for the dowry.

However, on his second or third trip, the matatu he was travelling in crashed at Mirera, not far from Naivasha.

All the passengers died. I remember the police saying that they found over a million shillings on the victims.

To everyone else, he was a statistic, one of the more than 3,000 people who die in road crashes every year.

To me, he was an inspirational figure. He was the first in our family to buy a scooter.

And when I worked in his barber shop as an apprentice, he would allow me to keep half of the money I earned each day.

He also allowed me to ride his bike to the national library.

Sadly, accidents claim the most enterprising people in our economy.

Many of them die on the road to success while chasing their dreams, but when we read about those who lose their lives in Salgaa or on Mombasa-Nairobi highway or Ntulele, these places sound like distant lands.

CHANGING NARRATIVE
Now, according to the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA), the number of people who have died between January 1 and September 20 has reached 2,180.

That is 55 more than those who died over the same period last year.

Yet, if you checked closely, you would notice that NTSA has carried out more crackdowns so far this year than it did the whole of last year.

Although we say in Kenya that about 3,000 people die on the road each year, according to the World Health Organization, the toll could be as high as 8,000.

Traffic police in Kenya mostly account for the people who die on the spot or those who are “declared dead on arrival at the hospital”.

The others, who die a week, a month, or a year after an accident are hardly ever accounted for as part of the growing number of road accident victims.

It always strikes me as ironic that despite the high number of road accident victims, Kenyans have not been outraged enough to demand that heads must roll.

How is it that in a country with some of the best business colleges in the region, the Kiganjo Police Training College still produces the highest number of millionaires per capita?

News reports about the vetting of traffic police officers sound like fiction.

Indeed, there was a joke last week that a young farmer had enrolled at Kiganjo to learn entrepreneurship.

But on a serious note, is this not blood money?

When motorists and drivers of public service vehicles routinely bribe police officers, are they not auctioning someone’s soul?

It is not that the authorities do not know what needs to be done.

True, we do not have enough police officers to ensure sanity on all our roads, not in the age of the boda bodas anyway.

But, as Mr Eric Kiniti, a road safety campaigner and a member of the Safe Way Right Way board, once told me, if we changed the design of the road in a place like Salgaa, this would significantly reduce the number of fatalities that occur there.

WHY THE INEFFECTIVE?

So, why are we not allocating money in the Budget to do this?

We know that if we increased the number of safe crossing points on the North Airport Road and the Thika superhighway in Nairobi, the number of pedestrians who die while crossing the road would decrease drastically.

What are we doing about it? And why do we have unmarked speed bumps on highways? We could go on and on.

According to Mr Kiniti, driver fatigue is also a leading cause of accidents, especially those involving public service vehicles that travel long distances.

However, there are no systems in place to ensure that such drivers work in monitored and regulated shifts, yet we know that in countries such as Britain, this has been done successfully, not by the government but by employers.

We know that repairing the roads leading to hospitals can save lives, and not just those of road accident survivors.

Yet, roads like the one leading to the Kijabe Mission Hospital have remained unrepaired for years, although the institution receives an inordinately high number of road crash survivors.

For how long will we sit back and take no action?

Mr Mbugua is the deputy managing editor of the Daily Nation. [email protected]