Bad motorists are a product of inept systems and graft
A traffic police officer inspects a safety belt on a passenger during an ongoing matatu crackdown in Nyeri on September 13, 2011. The authorities seem ever-ready to crack down on the conduct of motorists, but utterly unwilling ever to buck up on their own performance. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
- The authorities seem ever-ready to crack down on the conduct of motorists, but utterly unwilling ever to buck up on their own performance. A decrepit vehicle (or driver) is not downloaded from cyberspace: it is the result of a systems failure.
- The day the public sees the authorities disciplining themselves, those motorists who do not immediately die of surprise or suspect that Armageddon is coming will be many times more willing and more likely to get roadworthy and stay roadworthy.
ROADWORTHINESS IS NOT an accessory that can be bolted-on to one part of a vehicle or driver. It has to be built-in to every part of the entire road transport system.
The easiest roadworthiness comes from relatively new vehicles, with the right specifications, supported by skilled and equipped workshops, operating to strict parts and service standards, driven by well-trained drivers, with sound and clear laws, running on smooth roads, properly marked and signposted, with orderly traffic flows, administrated with a level of skill, integrity and consistent discipline that commands universal respect.
What we have instead is disproportionately old and ill-spec’d vehicles, a formal service system that has been dismembered by the politico-economic demolition of standards, driver semi-training and nano-testing, whimsical laws that not even lawyers can interpret; running on roads which are often diabolical in design, construction or maintenance (and frequently all three), with markings and signs that range from wrong to absent, traffic that splutters between snarl-up and dodgems, and administration which – though possibly a paragon of moral rectitude and technical proficiency – is for some reason widely believed to be technically maladroit and unabashedly corrupt.
SYSTEM FAILURE
Granted, some action (sometimes Herculean but rarely optimal) is being taken on some of those issues. And I do believe Kenya’s motoring classes are ready for stricter discipline; would even welcome it.
Anyone with a grey-cell count of more than one surely recognises how much better and safer and nicer and ultimately more economical motoring would be if there was some order – a clear code, widely observed, firmly and fairly enforced.
What sticks in the public craw is not that the law, or its enforcers, might demand more roadworthy vehicles. It is that they do not also demand, and enforce, more roadworthy roads! And parts! And workshops! And policing!
The authorities seem ever-ready to crack down on the conduct of motorists, but utterly unwilling ever to buck up on their own performance. A decrepit vehicle (or driver) is not downloaded from cyberspace: it is the result of a systems failure.
It’s high time those with the power to punish also addressed the cause of that failure. And if they want a hint where to find the roots of that: Look in a mirror. The day the public sees the authorities disciplining themselves, those motorists who do not immediately die of surprise or suspect that Armageddon is coming will be many times more willing and more likely to get roadworthy and stay roadworthy.
It is time to restore some balance. If you have a leaking shock absorber, armies of officials will descend upon you with wrath and righteousness. But where are the officials who should have found and fixed the pothole that broke the shock absorber in the first place?
Right now, in terms of social contract, it’s a heads-they-win and tails-we-lose deal and the public is sick of it. Right now the balance is so bad that it is hard to decide whether the law maker or the law breaker is more in need of correction. And it don’t get much sadder than that.
