Weak, incompetent and useless

I return to my Pet Peeve of the Year yet again after a woman with the promise of youth is killed because Evans Kidero's government is weak, incompetent and useless. Mwiki SACCO's matatus do not operation in a regulatory vacuum; they operate with impunity because the County Government of Nairobi City is weak, incompetent and useless. It's weakness, incompetence and uselessness is demonstrated in the small indignities it imposes on the commuting public - and the risks it places on pedestrians because of its weakness, incompetence and uselessness.

Take Tom Mboya Street, for example. Between Luthuli Avenue and the Fire Station, Tom Mboya Street seems to have become a bus terminus and a tax rank and a hawkers' paradise and a pickpocket's wet dream all rolled into one. We can blame John Michuki, when he was transport minister, for the mess he created when he abolished the Kenya Bus Service's monopoly on the Central Business District, but that was a decade ago. We have a City County Government. It has done little to improve things. It is weak, incompetent and useless.

The consequences of this County Government's weakness, incompetence and uselessness are varied and plain to see: the street is a mess for non-PSV traffic; the vehicular emissions have poisoned the air and blackened the must-be-painted walls of all the establishments that operate along the street; the human traffic is constrained and crammed to too little a space for its size; death, while not common, is usually a heartbeat away from the rising cases of injuries. The Governor has been proud of his street lights and his traffic camera; they ave done little to ameliorate the extremely chaotic conditions on Tom Mboya Street.

But the proof of the Governor's  weakness, incompetence and uselessness is to be seen away from the chaos of Tom Mboya Street and on the most serikali of the serikali part of the CBD, Harambee Avenue. Pedestrians are treated with hostility. Non-serikali drivers are treated with hostility. The traffic jams, once common only during evening rush hour as motorists tried to get onto Uhuru Highway are now a common sight all day long between Parliament Road and Moi Avenue.  How he hopes to turn Nairobi City into a world class city without standing up for the things that make a world city remains a mystery only he can solve.

The Governor is working on grand transport plans for the City, that involve road construction and railway construction and mass transit buses. These plans have one key element that every Governor in Kenya loves - a massive government tender worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We need new roads. We need an urban commuter rail system. We need mass transit buses. But until we get them, we must deal with the mess Michuki and his successors gave this City: the matatu industry on drugs and on our streets. 

Hard decisions must be made and none harder than banning the idling of these monstrosities on our streets. If those Mwiki SACCO buses hadn't been stationary and if their drivers hadn't felt the need to squeeze together so that more buses could park, that young woman would probably be alive today. If this county government hadn't been weak, incompetent and useless, she would be alive today. If this county government doesn't know or understand this, then we are really in trouble.