Corruption makes nonsense of tough laws

By Nicholas Waitathu

KENYA: A driver of a 14-seater matatu loses control and plunges into a quarry. Nineteen dead and others severely injured. How did this happen? The matatu was carrying twice its expected passenger limit.

An irate provincial police boss wants to know how it happened. Another driver of 14-seater matatu, this time with eleven passengers aboard tries to overtake, but rams into a truck and eventually being hit by a bus. The eleven passengers die; all these in a span of three days.

This comes barely three months after the Government launched and advertised laws that matatu operators said were too stringent to be put in place. So with the laws in place with police on the roads where did the rain start beating us?

The police have so far arrested 10,000 traffic offenders under the new Traffic Act, and imposed fines of Sh25m, said Traffic Commandant Benson Kibue, who has launched a phone hotline for citizens to report cases of drivers bribing traffic police.

Traffic offenders

“The 10,000 traffic offenders have paid fines to the tune of Sh25 million. This demonstrates how the Government is determined to ensure the traffic users have complied with the outlined regulations,” he said in a phone interview with The Standard On Saturday.

The Traffic Act came into force on December 1, introducing a raft of heavy penalties for traffic offences.

The Traffic Police Department is also now launching a system dubbed toa sauti with a hotline number – 0202603814 – for citizens to call and reports drivers, conductors, and traffic police officers who are caught giving and receiving bribes.

Local and international organisations have for long censured the police officers for colluding with matatu operators to perpetuate corruption leading to mounting road hazards and one of the highest rates of road deaths in the world.

But Mr Kibue said thousands of arrests had been made of drivers, conductors, touts, passengers and vehicle owners.

Despite multiple witnesses to the rise in bribes following from the law, it is corroborated through courts and defendants that the law is also being officially enforced.

One driver who sought anonymity said two weeks ago, he was arrested for driving on pavements in Nakuru and fined Sh30,000. “I had to pay the fine otherwise I would have spent three months in jail,” he said.

Speaking of the 10,000 Kenyans so far charged, Kabue said: “We have charged them for committing the offences as outlined in the amended Traffic Act 2012 and to send the message to everybody in the country that a new dawn is being realised in the industry.”

The offences include speeding, driving on pavements, obstruction, driving a vehicle without consent, driving under influence of a drink, and touting.

Other offences are fraudulent imitation of documents, careless driving and reckless driving or driving in a speed and manner dangerous to the public.

Kibue said the crackdown on violation of the new law is continuing and nothing will deter the police from ensuring the law is followed to the letter.

“For long, Kenyans have suffered under the hands of the rogue matatu operators who even in the presence of the road signs do not want to adhere to the set procedures but prefer to use short cuts,” he said.

“Due to criminality that has characterised the industry, most investors both local and international have always avoided the industry and preferred placing their wealth in other sectors of the economy,” he said.

Many matatu routes are manned by organised groups, for example, in central Kenya and Nairobi, matatu operators have to pay illegal charges to the proscribed Mungiki sect. Kibue said the prosecutions so far demonstrated impunity in the matatu industry was coming to an end.

Level of graft

However, commentators have continued to criticise the weakness in enforcement and levels of graft. Kenya Private Sector Alliance chief executive officer Carole Kariuki said massive graft is hampering industry growth, which is attributable to lack of sound enforcement mechanism. “For example, failure by the Government to install modern cameras on the road has created a bigger room for corruption and other loopholes,” she said.

Kibue accepts that this is true, but argues that new measures are now being fast tracked to eradicate the corruption, as drivers seek to fend off charges through bribing individual officers.