We should discuss how we can have sustained public awareness on road safety and our culture as drivers and passengers.
The year-end festive season has ended and Kenyans are already back to nation building after a deserved break from a very tiring and trying 2017.
Those yet to make new year resolutions are in the process of finalising them. I suspect even those who do not engage in this ritual will have one thing at the top of their wish list. That may 2018 be better than last year not just for themselves, but for the entire country.
Unfortunately, just as has become the norm during the festive season we again lost many lives through road accidents. There are several sections of particular roads that are known as black spots. Various reasons account for their being categorised as such with the common feature being the frequency of accidents and loss of lives.
One such spot is on Nakuru-Eldoret Highway at a place called Sachangwan. Although this spot has had accidents over the year, this past December was unprecedented. Kenya is traditionally one of the countries with leading cases of road accident deaths globally. This is not something to be proud of.
Efforts to deal with road carnage has seen concerted efforts in recent past including reforms to the Traffic Act and the establishment of the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA).
NTSA was established to deal with the increased road carnage and improve safety on our roads through co-ordinated government action.
It is approximately five years since it was established through parliamentary legislation. Five years is the country’s electoral term and also the period for development of medium- term development plans. Normal reflection on the performance of various elected office holders takes place within this period. Consequently, it is an opportune time to reflect on the performance of NTSA.
We would urge that such an evaluation be undertaken for NTSA. The necessity for this is way too obvious. Anecdotal evidence in the public domain demonstrates that we are not yet out of the woods. The December events on our roads painted a bleak picture on this institution.
The task of helping avoid speeding is noble. Several accidents are as a result of reckless driving at high speeds. However, the strategy deployed in maintaining speed limits is archaic. What is worse is the rent-seeking behaviour that accompanies it.
The second concern is the latest action on 31st December, 2017 to ban night travel of public service vehicles following an accident that claimed over 30 lives on the same Eldoret-Nakuru Highway.
This is not the first time that NTSA has banned night travel by public service vehicles. In 2014, there was a comprehensive legal notice on several measures to contain accidents by these vehicles.
One must, therefore, ask how effective those measures were and what results they achieved. It is only then that we can ask why is it necessary to ban night travel again, if we did so in the past and stopped after some time?
The second issue is the timing. Coming at a time when schools were reopening and many residents reporting back to work after the holidays, the action had unintended negative consequences.
One may argue that this does not compare with the loss of lives, but why should an agency charged with safety on our roads have to wait for a crisis so as to act.
This reactive, occasional approach by NTSA shows that it is no better than the bodies that existed before it.
The country may be better accepting the reality that this agency has failed to live up to its billing, disband it, save the taxpayers the colossal sums of money invested in it and reform the Traffic Police Department to deal with maintenance of law and order on the roads.
Thereafter we should then discuss how we can have sustained public awareness on road safety and our culture as drivers and passengers. NTSA has neglected to deal with this later issue, yet it is at the core of solving our road carnage crisis.
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