I am wholly prepared to concede that the boda boda menace has completely gone out of control. Today's fatal accident between a Citi Shuttle and a boda boda that resulted in the death of the boda boda rider and the subsequent attack by his compatriots that resulted in the bus being set on fire harkens back to the early days of the Mwai Kibaki presidency when his Minister of Transport, the authoritarian John Michuki, attempted to rein in the out-of-control matatu industry.
We all remember how the matatu industry came to be so dominant. The fateful decision by Mzee Jomo Kenyatta to accommodate the demands of "investors" in the matatu sector, while simultaneously undermining the urban public transport jointly operated by City Hall and Kenya Bus Service at the time, would eventually end up with the organised criminal enterprise known as Mungiki becoming a law unto itself. Mr. Michuki, both as Minister of Transport and Minister of Internal Security, waged a violent and relentless war to rein in the Mungiki and the matatu sector.
When his war started, it was waged entirely through enforcement of the existing regulatory framework enacted by the central government (Traffic Act) and City Hall (Nairobi City by-laws). The decisions made by Mr. Michuki regarding road safety led to the imposition of new traffic rules on speed governors, night driving for PSVs and seatbelt use by PSV passengers. They were not enough; the road fatalities continued to climb. The Mungiki had morphed into an army and it took great extrajudicial violence to rein them in: Mr. Michuki oversaw a bloody campaign of abductions and extrajudicial killings that finally broke the Mungiki's back.
The war on the Mungiki had terrible knock-on effects. Police forces, especially the dreaded CID, were later on to be unleashed on "terrorists" and "terrorist sympathisers". It will never be known how many innocent Kenyans fell victim to the violence on Mr. Michuki's orders; what is known is that the framework of abductions and murders became entrenched. The allegations against the police forces arising out of the June 2024 and June 2025 public protests hammer home this view.
In the 2025 protests, "goons" were deployed by elected representatives to counter-protest the so-called Gen Z protestors. Many of the "goons" were ferried to protests by boda bodas, and many of the "goons" were, in fact, boda bodas. This was a culmination of a decade of lax regulation of the sector. From as early as 2012, it was clear that without a coherent road safety policy for boda bodas, they would become ungovernable. Half-hearted efforts to control them always came a cropper, whether it was confining them to designated parking spaces in Town or the wearing and use of safety equipment.
What is certain is that the transformation of what we know as public transport has not been followed by a rethinking of existing road transport policies. The design of roads remains rooted in a desire to move large numbers of passenger motor vehicles from one place to another. Other road users - including mkokoteni pullers, boda bodas, traditional taxicabs, digital taxicabs, licensed and unlicensed matatus and traditional buses - are afterthoughts, if they are thought of at all. Their needs are only addressed long after the needs of passenger motor vehicle road users have been addressed and even in this arrangement, there is a hierarchy of motor vehicle roads users. At the top are Government officials in their massive Toyota Land Cruiser Prados and chase cars; at the bottom are the owners of sub-1000cc ex-Japan shitboxes.
The chaos fomented by boda bodas is part of a larger dysfunction in road transport policy. Chasing the boda bodas from public roads will not solve the other parts of the dysfunction. A holistic approach is called for. One area of focus that would improve the situation is the rehabilitation and upgrading of non-motorised transport infrastructure, particularly footpaths and on-street business (otherwise incorrectly called "hawkers"). What public investment that has been set aside for new roads should be dedicated to rehabilitating non-motorised infrastructure to ensure that pedestrians, on-street vendors and non-motorised transportation like mkokoteni are effectively incorporated in the infrastructure. In my opinion, this would eliminate half of the congestion on public roads, with pedestrians and the vendors who serve them being confined exclusively to the pavement, and out of harms way.
Secondly, more off-street parking should be prioritised, and new PSV termini for off-peak parking developed to accommodate the massive number of PSVs that spend half the workday parked on the street, taking up valuable public road space that could otherwise be used to move motor vehicles within the CBD. This should be done concurrently with an upward revision of on-street parking fees. The current parking fee is the CBD and its immediate environs is too low which has the effect of making it ineffective in regulating availability of on-street parking. The proposal to introduce a motor vehicle tax from the 2024 was intended, in part, to solve this problem but in typical ham-fisted, deaf-eared serikali fashion, it was not introduced honestly and was shot down together with that accursed tax law in which it was contained.
Mr. Michuki's draconian tactics to subvert the Mungiki's hold on public transport ended up creating a monster that continues to consume us, more than twenty years after the destruction of Mungiki. Messrs. Chirchir (Roads and Transport) and Murkomen (Interior and National Administration) need a different approach, one that has the highest chance of transforming road transport into a safe and efficient system, and one that does not need coercive force to work. It would also have the added incentive of creating new public procurement opportunities that will create jobs at every level, which is something this Government is determined to address. But proposals to employ tiger same draconian measures beloved of the late Mr. Michuki will not only not work, but will guarantee that the Government is reviled going into the next general election.
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