Implement laws to the letter and eliminate road carnage

When the Traffic (Amendment) Act 2012 was okayed in May by the Cabinet, the country waited with bated breath to see what other revisions would make it to the Act.

The initial reaction was a collective nationwide sigh of relief that someone, somewhere, was doing something substantive about addressing the niggling matter of the country’s leading killer – road accidents.

We revisit this, even though it is a matter that has been covered before in these pages, because the country is haemorrhaging as road accidents claim their pound of flesh daily and leave thousands more with severe injuries year-on-year.

Road accidents occur for a variety of reasons and the amendments sought to address these. One was the corruption in the issuance of drivers’ licenses as well as registration of automobiles and other types of transport.

Many accidents have been the handiwork of unlicensed drivers/riders or by those who merely received the document for some monetary or other considerations.

They often have no inkling about what the signage on the roads mean. It might as well make a good source of scrap metal.

Underhand dealing by motor vehicle owners, fleet managers, and drivers as they seek to compromise traffic officers, Customs and weighbridge personnel is a documented fact. These have all been criminalised under the new Act.

Build databases

It has streamlined duties and responsibilities so that scenes where city council askaris clashed with traffic police officers will no longer be witnessed. And while we seek to emulate more advanced nations whose level of information technology (IT) usage is way beyond Kenya’s, it is instructive that the authorities invest more on IT and build databases of personal information.

And since the laws already exist and appear punitive enough to restore driving sense into road users, the only other gap is an implementation unit, policing authority or even, just the goodwill of top State organs.