Can there be road safety campaigns that work?

About two years ago, there was hullabaloo on new media platforms over the speed limits that had been introduced by some transport and safety authority which does not seem to understand what safety is.

Motorists were mad, irked by the fact that they were being told to slow down in order to reduce traffic accidents or to be safe, yet safety is something that has never been espoused in the lives of Kenyans.

Slowing down, they argued will not solve any problems — but what was more annoying was lack of road signs informing them where to start slowing down and where to rev it.

Roads should be safe, no doubt. Kenyans should espouse safety as a matter of fact, and road accidents should not be one of the leading causes of deaths in Kenya now that it has been established that help is never so near after an accident and the first responders are mostly thugs who rob the victims.

That is the tragedy of driving on Kenyan roads. Motorists are not safe anywhere and even the law enforcement agencies and other State entities do not offer much solace.

Why Kenyans hate employing safety measures is a mystery.

It is equally a mystery why the government entities that come up with all these lopsided and half-hearted road safety measures have never realised that the problem does not start at the road. That is where it ends. Literally in as much as that is where journeys and lives end.

Telling people to slow down and live is the oldest road safety campaign the world over. It was there even before the safety belts were introduced and some countries started the buckle up and live campaigns.

But slowing down and living as a road safety campaign cannot work when it is not supported by other back room policies and measures that instil not only discipline in the minds of road users but also make them understand that they are the ones most likely to be victims in an accident.

Kenyan road users or just Kenyans in general have never internalised the commonsensical adage that “safety starts with me” and always think that their carelessness and recklessness will always hurt or injure another party.

Safety as it were is never inculcated in a Kenyan’s culture and the so-called parental authority’s numerous entities have never realised that for road carnage to be reduced, the safety campaigns will have to start at an earlier stage before someone gets the spine to sit behind a wheel and set off with the thought that it is another party that will get hurt.

It is not possible to tell a Kenyan who believes that he is the best driver just because he owns a vehicle that he needs to be safe when he never acquired proper driving skills.

How can someone who attended a non-regulated backstreet driving school for a few hours just as a formality because he was buying the licence anyway supposed to understand what safety on the road is all about?

How will the corrupt driving school owner who bribed his way through corrupt State entities in order to get a business permit understand what safety is all about when his aim is to recover what he paid to get the go ahead to go and churn out unskilled motorists?

Is it really possible to tell an extremely busy traffic police officer that a driving test is much more than just cranking the vehicle and moving it forward by a few inches when he is underpaid and overworked and is in a rush to go net supposed speedsters who are ready to pay bribes so that they can be free to go and maim other road users?

It is not possible to have long-term measures that will save lives when policy makers or the busybodies who think of them are just groping in the dark and have not conducted some sort of research or a study to determine what it is exactly that makes Kenyan roads unsafe.

Then there is the issue of signage. How many Kenyan motorists understand them? For a start, how many Kenyan motorists have seen the pamphlet called the Highway Code?

Has the wrongly named transport and safety authority ever conducted any elaborate sensitisation campaigns to educate road users on road safety or they just to sit back at their equally unsafe offices and dream up unworkable ways that only act to increase road carnage they are just revenue streams for law enforcement officers?

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and be safe during the festive season.

A version of this article appeared in the Standard in

September 2014