The love language of shameful silence

One of the meanings of "careful" is "making sure of avoiding potential danger, mishap, or harm; cautious", while "careless" means "not giving sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harm or errors". One of the hallmarks of a careful person (or institution) is pride in their name. Careful people will not hide their identity (unless they are careful crooks). In the public service, this who take time t think through their decisions, consult widely when taking decisions, and speak honestly when taking responsibility for their actions, rarely see the need to hide their identities. Their intention is almost always to avoid danger, harm or mishaps.

Careful is not the image that comes to mind when you think of the Kenya Roads Board or its roads authorities, the Kenya National Highways authority, Kenya Urban Roads Authority or Kenya Rural Roads Authority. It is no longer the image that comes to mind when one thinks of the National Transport and Safety Authority or the Traffic Department of the Kenya Police Service. Most road users in Kenya think of these institutions, and their managers and boards of directors, as careless. The death, injury and destruction of property caused by their carelessness is all the proof one needs.

Many factors have contributed to the death, injury and damage caused on our roads. The corruption of the Police and NTSA when it comes to the operation of roadworthy or unroadworthy motor vehicles on our roads comes to mind. The incredibly poor driving skills of the majority of motorists, including drivers of public service vehicles and other kinds of commercial vehicles, cannot be ignored either. The fatalistic risk-taking by other road users can also not be gainsaid.

But of all the factors that contribute to the current dire situation, one of the major ones is that the roads we have are badly designed. Perhaps the design on paper applied the latest techniques adopted in other jurisdictions that have lower rates of death, injury or destruction. But designs on paper don't save lives. IN Kenya, praise is always given for perfect documentary designs. There's that apocryphal anecdote of Kenyan policy documents being successfully implemented by Asian Tigers while the very same policies gather dust in ministry archives. The same may be true when it comes to our roads.

Maybe the implementation of those old designs is sacrificed at the altar of greed, corner-cutting and outright theft of funds and construction material. But the fact that when you try, for example, to find out who the members of the KENHA board are, you end up with a blank page tells you everything you need to know about the nature of the institution. It is not proud of its work. It is not proud of its oversight bodies. It is not proud of its managers. And it is deeply, deeply ashamed of the quality of its work. Why wouldn't they hide their identities?

Very few are nowadays unaware that Kenyan roads are not fit for purpose. Not even for the motorists for whom the roads are ostensibly reserved for. The shiny new elevated expressway is very good at connecting the various exits along its 27 km stretch, but every exit leads to a traffic jam. Thika Super Highway is a funnel that brings clogged traffic into the CBD in the morning and sends it back to Githurai in the evening. Langata Road has a beautiful interchange at T-Mall but only so that it can deliver yo to the Nyayo HighriseEstate/Nyayo Stadium traffic jam in all haste. What all these somewhat impressive feats of civil engineering lack is any sort of common sense. Little or no accommodation is made for Nairobi's legion of pedestrians, nduthists, mkokoteni pullers, and brave-beyond-belief cyclists. Our focus on cars and car drivers has not solved the "traffic problem" and has, instead, made the roads quite unsafe.

So I revisit the shame of the Kenya Roads Board, its roads authorities, the Traffic Department, NTSA and the men and women who make decisions that cause untold harm and damage. They hide their faces because they now that they cannot afford to admit that they are the charlatans who have led to so much death and injury. They hide their shame because in Kenya, shameful silence is their love language.

Don't blame the ma-three

One member of the Fat Wallet Association of Kenya thinks that the solution to the increasing numbers of accidents on the still-shiny Nairobi Expressway is to ban matatus from the road. In her considered opinion, an opinion shared by a few members of her social and economic class, the design flaw in respect of the highway is the drivers. (She means matatu drivers - not the wabenzi for whom the road was built in the first place.)

I am privileged to own a car. I drive, I hope, with care and respect for other road users, even the ones who drive other road user up the wall with heir asinine antics. I have driven long enough to know that assumptions about certain kinds of road users aren't always true or accurate. The most destructive assumption is that matatu drivers are automatically bad drivers; and those who drive top-of-the-range multi-million-shillings SUVs and limos are automatically the best. But if one has driven on any road in Kenya, one can see that the quality of drivers, regardless of the cars they drive, is broadly the same.

The problems on the roads in Kenya are design problems, many of which have been identified by urban planners and road-builders over the past decade. Kenyan roads are not designed primarily with safety in mind; they are designed primarily to resolve "traffic congestion". The Nairobi Expressway was designed to ease traffic congestion for those "going to the airport". Safety may have played a role in the design, but it was not the primary concern of the designers of the road. And it shows.

You can see this cavalier approach to road design on Ngong Road, which has led to such terrible and tragic outcomes. You can see it in the design of Outer Ring Road, which witness deaths at such a high rate that one is shocked all that blood has not motivated the Kenya Roads Board to take any action whatsoever. Thika Superhighway kills with impunity. And before Kenyans on Twitter rallied to the road safety banner, the brand-spanking-new Waiyaki Way was well on its way to being awash with he blood of pedestrians and other road users. The poor road design is the primary contributor to road traffic accidents in Kenya.

The second, in my opinion, is the extreme laissez-faire attitude of the forces of law and order. The Highway Code, the Traffic Act, the National Transport and Safety Act and the several bye-laws on traffic management and road use are enforced with an extremely light thought for some road users - the wabenzi of today - and in increasingly draconian ways for those unwilling and unable to pay the bribes solicited/demanded by traffic police. You have seen the casual and reckless way in which GK-plated Prados are driven at high speed on the wrong side of the road because "mkubwa anachelewa mkutano ya muhimu" while the rest of the driving masses are stuck on the side of the road negotiating hefty bribes for minor traffic infractions. The contempt for the law, both by law enforcement and road users, has contributed to the dangerous state of the roads and so long as we continue to treat GK-plated Prados and similar "official" cars as if they were occupied by minor gods of greek mythology, all the beautiful road designs in the world will not eliminate the death and destruction witnessed on our roads.

I pity our Fat Wallet correspondent. She labours under a false sense of outrage at the antics matatu drivers get upto on the road. In the parlance of the bible, she ignores the speck in her eye all the while railing and cavilling about the plank in ours. So long as she is silent about the poor road design and the differential traffic law enforcement, she is complicit in the death and destruction on the highway. If she cannot use her platform, her brand and her access to high-ranking government officials to advocate for saner, and safer, road design policies, all she is doing is pissing up our legs and telling us that it is raining.