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Insurers must prioritise loss assessment

insurance

If insurers want to sell us insurance, they need to be serious about their loss assessment, and not bundle it out into a world of bribes. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Across Kenya, insurers bemoan the lack of insurance uptake. They call it insurance penetration, and examine graphs showing the tiny percentages of Kenyans who insure themselves.

When their minds lift from the sorry fact of the country’s limited insurance purchasing, they then bemoan how little of any premiums they end up with, in the deluge of so-called false claims.

Yet a mindset like that is often indicative of structural issues being pushed away. And the clue lies in public behaviour. If people aren’t buying it, then, generally, there’s something wrong with it.

And in the case of our car insurance, to take but one small slice of insurance, there is, indeed, something very wrong.

For it is a sad truth in our nation that we just don’t happen to have the most efficient or integrity-driven police force in the world. It’s a hole that leaves us gaping in place after place, and insurance is one of them.

Elsewhere in the world, people bump cars too. They scrape, they collide, and sometimes they truly crash. The police come for the crashes, because there are people hurt, and traffic needs redirecting, and debris removing.

But they do not come for the scrapes, or the minor collisions, and why would they? No one’s hurt, both vehicles are still mobile and operational. There is merely the matter of fault to settle, and any insurance claims to repair any damage. And fault really isn’t that hard.

Yet it’s the fault thing that’s wild in our nation.

For every tiny scrape involves vehicles stopping right where they are, no matter if they block up the entire city of Nairobi as two scraped buses spanning the central arterial highway – stopped they will stay, until the police arrive to determine fault.

Truth be told, fault can sometimes be murky, if two wide vehicles scrape with both sets of tyres in lane, then who is at fault? Elsewhere that occasional shared blame would mean a 50/50 split on responsibility.

But here the highest bidder gets the claim.

And the extraordinary thing is that is the case even where fault is crystal clear. Globally, a rear end collision is the fault of the moving car, the one that crashed into the other. Here, no. Here, we can reverse our way into crashes, apparently.

Or, even, and this one still awes me, we can move sideways, literally, into a collision, with tyres, presumably, that can turn a full 90 degrees and gaily move our vehicle into another on our side.

Of course, we don’t have those tyres, and when a vehicle is hit side on, in its own lane, with one of those nasty scrapes down its length, we could just get real and admit the driver at the other driving wheel was not doing a good job that day.

Nonetheless, with fault an open season, assigned to he who has the most might, the greatest sway, or the fattest purse, of course our car insurance becomes a pointless thing.

We observe the legalities. We buy our third party. But who buys comprehensive when it just becomes a pot for every offence that was actually committed against us and not by us?

So the problem lies at the start. The police intervention causes 1,000 traffic jams. It overrides photos, common sense, eye witnesses. And it rules out leagues of legitimate claims, and generates buckets of illegitimate ones.

And all the time our insurance sector carries on that way, bypassing claim investigations, saving on a team to examine the vehicles and road in a fairly simple process, and creating mayhem within its own sector in costs and losses short-term and long-term.

But then that’s how a stuck sector can be. Listen to the narrative, about how consumers are too daft to buy its products. Listen to the narrative about how consumers are too crooked to respect its products. And what you may well find is that, actually, the problem lies in the product.

If insurers want to sell us insurance, they need to be serious about their loss assessment, and not bundle it out into a world of bribes. They need us to trust that their insurance will insure us.