Our neglect of safety has hit alarming levels

Why do we systematically, institutionally, individually, and professionally, just keep killing people in Kenya?

It’s a painful reality for which we all seem to hold collective responsibility - in thousands of shortcuts, inattentions to detail and consequence, and decisions to let a few more lives go hang, that make it hard to pinpoint the true nature of our malaise.

I have wondered if it’s a matter of psychology, explained by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, which spells out the basics of human motivation.

A near 80-year-old model, Maslow’s pyramid is supposed to lay out the stages of ‘human growth’.

It begins at the base of the pyramid with physiological needs - food, shelter, water - and posits that until these are met, we are never motivated to secure the next band up, of safety.

Yet, is it actually possible, with our highest education level in Africa, our rich and abundant middle class, our rising problems with obesity on so many so well fed, that we are stuck as a complete society on that very bottom band?

The fact is that the majority of Kenya and Kenyans are not starving and homeless. So why, are we so scantily motivated to achieve safety? For here we all are, doing the same dangerous things, the same dangerous ways. Take poor Sarit Centre, so far through its rebuild, and a fire. But a store with electronic equipment without a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher? A mall without fire hydrants? Tenders without water tanks?

Just compute all the educated, well-to-do, fully-fed professionals in that one line-up of comprehensive neglect of safety.

And then there’s the rain. We have two rainy seasons a year in Kenya. Not unpredictable, not wildfire acts, but regular, here-they-come-again rains: and legions of professionals handling infrastructure.

Yet driving today on Peponi Road, a motorcyclist in front of me capped the edge of a pothole, his tyre swerved and sent him, in a split second, into a two-foot deep ditch beside a steep bank, in the fourth crash in my own space in just half a month: all on potholes and poor drainage.

For, in our world of ever-burgeoning potholes, we have guys crush stones to fill them, but we don’t have them coat the repaired holes with tarmac, with those cheap little mobile machines, so the stones wash out again.

Nor are the private roads any better for safety, as the brick roads by Westgate over the Nairobi River get lifted every severely rainy day, over and over and over. And thus, city wide, crashes mount, hospitals fill, suspensions fail.

Yet imagine the engineering degrees, the brains, the number of 40-hour weeks: and we can’t crack a pothole or paving solution that ends the rainy-road carnage?

Which brings us back to Maslow’s Hierarchy: for if it isn’t an absence of wit, or time, or education, or manpower, is it just a lack of interest? Is it that safety just doesn’t get our commitment?

For here’s the thing: supposedly, after we’re fed, and are then motivated to achieve safety, we move on to love and belonging. There’s no shortage of love and belonging in Kenya. Then we get into stuff like our own esteem and doing what makes us happy. All of these things are interesting for our middle classes: people are motivated to achieve them.

So how did we leave out the safety bit? Indeed, is it our middle and upper classes who are the thugs in this, sitting in offices designing, approving, commissioning and installing glass lifts and waterfalls, but not hydrants (boring: safety)? Owning and running businesses without extinguishers? Filling potholes but not weatherproofing them?

Is our malaise just ever-blossoming impunity? A failure, exclusively, by we at the top.

For we, the owners, decision-makers, the professionals, we are not stuck at Maslow’s stage 1: we are fed, and motivated to marry, achieve career success, and buy iPhones. So are other peoples’ lives just too cheap to bother with: in a stage 2 safety motivation hole that’s causing deaths for all of us?

Yet once dead on the roads, or in a fire, no-one gets to be in love or use an iPhone. And fires and potholes don’t choose, making safety a precondition for everything beyond survival.