Our bad road conduct defines us

Twice this week, I had the misfortune of driving behind a lorry ferrying building blocks and another full of rubble from an excavation site. Some hung so precariously that if a piece happened to fall on a smaller vehicle on the side, death or injury would have been inevitable. Ominously, a vehicle on the side had excited school children enjoying carefree time nearby.

In my mind, I wondered whether the driver and the loader knew they were potential agents of death. Even the traffic police officers didn’t seem to either notice or care about how dangerously the stones had been piled. On a number of occasions I have had to slam on the brakes to avoid loose sand pebbles from an open-trunk lorry driving ahead of me rather than risk getting blinded or having my windscreen covered.

These incidents reminded me of the case of the unmarked road bumps dotting our roads; it is as if we are supposed to smell them from far. Yet these bumps are actually artificial black-spots, something you discern from the braking marks and broken glasses around them.

But as usual, you will be told they are put up to protect pedestrians. Even villagers have arrogated themselves the duty of erecting them using stones and mounds of soil where presumably, pedestrians have been killed. Bumps are normally supposed to also uphold safety while slowing down vehicles, but this is hardly the case.

Worse, we spend billions to build roads to ensure fast movement of people, goods and services, then cut off the intended goal with huge bumps instead of rumble strips.

There is also another curious factor in Kenya regarding town planning and the script is the same. Wherever a road is coming up or is being expanded, ‘plots-for-sale’ signs come up on either side. Once complete, shopping centres, usually with bars and nyama choma joints crop up on either side. In three months, after commissioning, there are road bumps at every shopping centre! Then we slow down traffic, a negation of exactly why we burned the billions to put up those sparkling roads.

If you venture out of the country to, say the West, you will realise that petrol stations, fast food joints and shopping malls are off the roads, with signs pointing how far they are. The logic is simple; let the roads have designated pedestrian crossings, but at least let traffic move and minimise points at which there are crossings to footbridges. Alternatively, they have under and over-passes.

Then to accentuate what Michael Joseph called ‘the peculiar habits of Kenyans’, we allow all manner of gardening and hawking on our road sides, including flower beds. Almost every year a vehicle loses control and kills several people selling vegetables and fruits on the round-about at Githurai and Kangemi. But even before they are buried, the fighting is on for the space they occupied on the danger spot!

We have also turned our roads into a convenient venue for political rallies, where our leaders including the President, stop to talk to a crowd. At times, I wonder if it crosses their minds that there could be a sick person in a vehicle being rushed from one hospital to another, or even a mother in labour.

Then there are the morons on big trucks who park their 24-wheeler trucks on both sides of the roads, giving just enough little room for the rest of us in buses, matatus and other small vehicles to squeeze through. Often-times, they are petrol tankers, and when one rams another and the ensuing inferno kills dozens, wananchi are quick to attribute it to “God’s own timing”, and the leaders quickly promise the Government will meet their burial costs.

Then take this case of a road to my residence in the city: A Chinese contractor is finally brought in to lay cabro blocks on what was easily a cattle-track on planet moon. It is done in a matter of days. Then trucks over and above the weight the road can withstand are allowed in, as usual. In days, there are sunken sections which, should it rain, easily turn into small lakes.

Then just near Simba Villa Estate in Embakasi, the guy contracted to put up sewerage lines comes after the road is done, digs out the cabro blocks, lays his culverts, then covers up with fresh soil and goes to the bank smiling to cash his cheque. The certificate of works completed is in the other pocket. To date, it is just a gulley left for us to sink in if we have to go across.

As if that is not enough, some nincompoops from the Nairobi City Council seemingly carrying on with the ‘dirtification’ of the city, dump leftover food, used sanitary pads and used baby diapers and all manner of waste on the roadside, yet the flies feeding on them live in their homes.

We could go on, but let us just end with the allocation of sections of our town spaces meant for roads expansion to ‘private developers’. Even sewer lines and storm waters drainage points are gone. Then we say we are one of Africa’s largest economy.

Which is true of course because we have chosen to turn our country into a cowshed and then opted to compare ourselves to our neighbours, not the best in international circles. In short, I see all what is wrong with our country on our roads every day, with those overlapping idiots mirroring the leaders we have, who steal at every opportunity and claim they are as clean as pamba (cotton)

That is why I think at times, we should not demand more from God because we have the leaders we deserve; those who reflect our crudeness, greed and avarice, all of them elected by us either by choice or bribery. Amen.