An absent CS and a muddled public transport system

Members of the public look at an ill fated public service bus belonging to Home boys and plying Kakamega-Nairobi route after it lost control at Fort Ternan in Kericho County on October 10,2018, killing over fifty people who were on board. [Photo: Denish Ochieng/ Standard]

You don’t need to look far to see how messed up Kenya’s transport sector is than how an overloaded bus whose insurance had expired two months ago and was not licenced to travel at night was allowed to drive 58 people to their deaths.

By our count, there are at least 16 road blocks between Nairobi and where the ill-fated bus veered off the road at Fort Ternan in Kericho County, rolling several times before ripping its roof off and lunging passengers to their deaths in the dark.

As expected, politicians came out to slam the government for what it termed as reactionary measures, demanding for the resignation of those culpable. It is a script we have seen many times.

“I have never seen where people die in terms of 40s, 50s, 60s, 100s and it is not shocking news. It is just temporarily shocking news,” said Senate Majority Leader Kipchumba Murkomen.

“In India, I remember when there was such an accident, the minister had to go -- as a mark of respect for the dead. In Kenya, nobody takes accountability,” said Minority Leader James Orengo.

But as politicians politic, a country cries over a transport system that can be best described as dead, and killing more the citizenry in tis wake.

And with the State coming up with knee-jerk reactions once in a while, the role of safety has been left to a police force with a huge appetite for blood money, ever willing to look the other way as Kenyans get slaughtered.

So disinterested is the government on improving safety on the roads that a communique from a Cabinet meeting held on Thursday, barely 48 hours after the Kericho accident had nothing to show that the State was concerned.

More excuses

Instead, the closest a statement from State House came to mentioning anything concerning Kenya’s roads is an endorsement for the establishment of the Eastern Africa Regional Roads Authorities Forum (EARRAF).

No senior official from the Transport ministry was present when all the agencies tasked with road safety addressed the nation on Thursday morning on what could have gone wrong.

And today, five days after the Kericho accident, Transport Cabinet Secretary James Macharia is yet to speak or even send condolences to the families who lost their loved ones despite his boss President Uhuru Kenyatta having done so.

Since taking over the Transport sector, Macharia has largely concentrated on the infrastructure element of the ministry while ignoring and leaving the safety bit to the agencies under him.

To his credit, Interior CS Fred Matiangi has been more pronounced in matters road safety.

Yesterday, he officially took responsibility for road crashes in the country and promised “painful” and “ruthless” regulations to curb road carnage. Matiang’i said there will be no more excuses.

“We cannot be making excuses every now and again. Our people have been so complacent with sticking to the existing regulations, but this time round, we will deal with it in a different way,” he said at Borabu in Nyamira County, without elaborating.

Chiding court decisions that slammed brakes on safe travel measures, Matiang’i vowed to “revist” the issues “one by one”.

In December, Matiang'i announced the de-registration of all driving schools after 70 people died in a span of three days. It is still not clear whether that directive was followed up.

Meanwhile, Kenyans continue to die, eroding the economic gains the same government is trying so hard to push by investing a lot of money on road construction.

According to statistics by the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA), 2,345 people had lost their lives by the beginning of this week “compared to 2,162 who succumbed to their injuries in 2017.”

Doomed pedestrians

“Pedestrians still account for the most vulnerable group, with 905 of them having died. 42 pedal cyclists have lost their lives, making them the least vulnerable group of road users,” says the authority.

Broken down, it means that since the beginning of the year, Kenya has lost two full primary schools or 42 classes of 40 students each to road carnage in just nine months.

One key reason for this runaway deaths is the knee-jerk way in which the government is handling road safety, analytsts say.

“You cannot run a transport sector with short-term measures that come up every time there is an accident,” says Dickson Mbugua, the Matatu Welfare Association chairman.

“This is our biggest failure and people must be held responsible.” 

Since the introduction of the famous Michuki Rules in 2004, every attempt at bringing sanity on our roads has been reactionary with no long-term implementation plan.

Last December’s ban on night travel was the latest to collapse because of a legal technicality.

The rule banning standing passengers, uniform colours for matatus, mandatory seat belts, speed limiters and uniforms for PSV crews have all fallen short after being announced.  The only policy being implemented to date is the random breathalyzer test.

Even depressing is the fact that the tests too have been turned into a money-making venture by the police. Predictably, the number of deaths has in