Nairobi residents need a road safety week campaign every seven days

There is trouble in paradise. And the Kenyans suffering most are those considered economically challenged by motorists and traffic police officers alike.

For several weeks, pedestrians in Nairobi have been whining about police harassment after being arrested crossing roads below footbridges, contraptions whose use Kenyans in general and Nairobians in particular have never known.

As a matter of fact, footbridges, which Kenyans wrongfully refer to as flyovers, which, in a way they are, have been treated like structures meant to beautify roads. They have been more like landscaping fixtures, flowers and trees on which millions of shillings are spent, and then not watered, and left to wither into eyesores.

For advertising agencies, they have been perfect places to put up billboards — every space is crucial, you know, and city power-brokers and ghost workers could always do with extra revenue.

And for the homeless — a legion in Kenyan urban centres, thanks to a growing economy that makes this a regional economic powerhouse where only joblessness and disempowerment are created — footbridges are places for ablution.

That has been the problem. No. It has been the excuse for pedestrians not to use the footbridges.

Traffic police officers were not taking notice of these installations before, or did not know what they are for. In fact, they were dutifully flagging down vehicles under the ‘flyovers’ so pedestrians could cross safely.

Thus, when the same officers started arresting pedestrians in the same areas, what followed was typically Kenyan; whining and speaking at cross purposes.

Motorists started smiling all the way to wherever they were going because they had just stopped being the high value targets of the police officers, who never pass on the chance to make an extra shilling from an errant motorist.

A welcome break this must be for drivers, for sure. For long, they have been on the receiving end while the sections under the footbridges were paradises for pedestrians. Woe unto the motorist who dared to drive through when royalty, read the pedestrians, were regally strolling across the road.

While the arrests might have exposed the ignorance of pedestrians, can it be said that Kenyan motorists are any better when it comes to adhering to traffic rules?

On a wider perspective, do Kenyans really care about safety on the road or anywhere else, or is everything left to God? When a disaster has occurred, people resort to holding inter-denominational prayer meetings.

That pedestrians who live in the city have to be forced to use footbridges or have to be arrested for them to understand that they should be safe, speaks volumes not only about the Kenyan way of understanding safety matters, but a lot more about the system of education.

By now, a whole half a century after Independence, Kenyans should have known that footbridges serve a purpose, but they have never bothered, just as Kenyan motorists have never cared much about road signs.

Safety on the road, or anywhere else, is not an event, and is not something that can be observed or implemented only seasonally, when the police realise that ‘the number of pedestrians being killed on Nairobi’s roads is on the rise’.

This is not the first time that pedestrians are dying on Nairobi’s roads. It happens every day, every week, every month, every year, and it has been happening for decades, but no meaningful long-term safety measures or education campaigns have been implemented to reduce the number of lives lost. Kenyans have numbed themselves into trusting that vehicles have eyes and will see them. So, the people go about their business blindly and hope the vehicles will do the right thing.

Motorists, on the other hand, believe that the road belongs to them only, and anyone who crosses ahead of them, even at the designated places, is trespassing and should be knocked down and taught a lesson.

Traffic police officers are too busy causing traffic gridlocks and then getting busier trying to clear their own mess to realise that the problem they are trying to sort out started way, way back, in the education system. To write that the traffic police system has perpetuated the recklessness on our roads is an understatement, considering that driving tests are a one- minute affair with an almost zero per cent chance of failure because driving school owners and instructors know how to manipulate the system.

Then there are the so-called road safety campaigns. The seasonal ones that reach top gear during the festive season then taper off, and then the madness is normalised. This insanity is so expected that Kenyans, especially Nairobi road users, get surprised and annoyed when they experience nothing untoward on the roads.

Kenya is probably the only country where bad driving habits are encouraged, even as citizens and their leaders keep wailing about road carnage. Actually, it has become fashionable to express outrage and then not take any corrective measures.

Of course, talk is cheap, and talking about the culprits, road carnage and road safety campaigns is even cheaper. While they are at it, they should remember that Nairobi needs a road safety campaign week every week.