Profit will kill us all.

There is an insidious infection abroad in the land, and it has especially afflicted the transport industry. Profit at all costs is what it is. When asked to name the worst of the worst when it comes to the business of moving Kenya's armies of workers from home to work and back again, one would not be surprised if the same names kept cropping up again and again: Citi Hoppa, City Shuttle, KBS, Forward Traveller, Nissan or Mike Sonko. The late John Njoroge Michuki may have been universally reviled by the hordes of civil society types who accused him of employing extra-legal means to rid Kenya of organised crime gangs such as the Mungiki, but millions of Kenyans stood four-square with him when he declared that the unruliness of the transport sector owners and operators had gone on for far too long. When he decided to reform the industry, he did so by using draconian means that received the unreserved support of the motoring public. Yet, less than a decade later hundreds of thousands of Kenyans continue to live in the shadow of the most reviled industry in all the land.

Amos Kimunya, the Minister for Transport, does not have the charisma or the personal fortitude that John Michuki had; it is anticipated that the amended Traffic Act will not be the panacea for our transport ills any time soon. The Kenya Railways Corporation is not riding to the rescue any time soon either; its plan to move thousand of motorists off the roads and onto its new swanky passenger trains will not solve the problem of moving millions of Kenyans on public roads in safety and comfort and at affordable fares. Until the good Minister grows a real spine, matatu crews will continue to cock a snook at him. They will flout any and all rules imposed on them; they will continue to endanger the public safety unless someone says enough is enough. Minister Kimunya has singularly failed to take a Michuki-like muscular approach to cleaning up the transport sector. His efforts may only bear fruit in the long run if he ignores the weeping and wailing of "investors" in the transport sector and enforced - ruthlessly - the laws already on the books.

In Kenya, laws operate as suggestions; no one really thinks that they should pay the price for committing traffic offenses. It is enough to "talk nicely" to the law enforcement officers, be they from the police service or from the notoriously corrupt local authorities. Matatu crews routinely flout the Traffic Code without batting an eye lid. In the quest to earn ever greater profit, they will routinely carry passengers beyond the allowed capacity for their vehicles, they'll overlap, they'll speed recklessly, they'll stop where they please to pick or drop off passengers; in short, they will put the interests of owners and operators ahead of the safety and comfort of their passengers. To take the case of City Hoppa for example, one is hard-pressed to find a single Citi Hoppa bust that is clean, with courteous crew, driven at a speed that guarantees greater safety or maintained in a manner that suggests resources were expended to make the bus safe. The 3 + 2 seating arrangement guarantees that even where the bus has clean and operable seat-belts, there is at least one row of passengers that will be unable to wear the lifesavers. Citi Hoppa buses are not designed to be safe; they are designed to earn its callous owners massive profits.

It is this profit instinct that places the nation in ever greater peril. When the courts ordered Kenya Airways to reinstate its sacked workers, the whingeing from the Kenya Private Sector Alliance was a sight to behold. At a press conference, the men and women speaking for Kenya's private sector were at pains to cavil against the courts for judgments that would affect their bottom lines. In the decade of President Kibaki's reign, the private sector has had a friend in State House, ever ready to offer them a willing ear when it came to government policy regarding investment and labour relations. They have abused this open door policy. In the last ten years, the numbers of Kenyan workers who could count on the security of an employment contract has dwindled drastically; many millions have worked in increasingly dangerous conditions because the private sector has always found a way of ensuring that the laws that protect workers have been watered down to irrelevance. No one says that investors should not enjoy a return on their investment; all one is asking is that rather than park your profits in some off-shore bank account or in property that you are unlikely to enjoy in ten lifetimes, it is time the private sector reconsidered its objectives.