THE MATATU LAWLESSNESS MUST BE PUNISHED ACCORDING TO THE LAW

By Jerry Okungu
January 10, 2010

As the year began this week, the matatu madness ushered us in to the New Year with the first of our many challenges. The fact that the first strike ever for Kenya by the matatu operators was planned to occur on the first day of work and opening of schools was telling in more ways than one.

Its message was clear and simple. If the industry feels aggrieved either by the government or the police department one way or another, its members will always resort to punishing their soft targets, the ordinary Kenyans that ironically are their primary market; commuters and school children. They never take on their real adversaries such as the government officials and the police department because such people hardly feel their frustrations.

The matatu menace is an evil that has come about due to our failures as governors of this country. The mess and mayhem punitively meted out by matatu operators on a daily basis on our roads is a culmination of years of lawlessness and impunity that has taken root in our entire social fabric.

I have always wondered and felt embarrassed to see a government driver ferrying a senior government official, mostly a minister or a permanent secretary committing multiple acts of traffic offences and getting away with it under the pretext that the government official sitting back left is late to his office or meetings!

If government drivers carrying government ministers and sometimes senior police officers can flout the traffic rules with abandon; overtake on the wrong side, drive over pavements and road shoulders and even block oncoming traffic in full glare of their police bosses and senior bureaucrats, what message are they sending to matatu touts and drivers that never went to school?

As I spent two hours on Tuesday evening this week driving to my house just two kilometers from the city centre, I watched in amazement how a police vehicle, registration number GK A 492E carrying a number of police men decided that it was no longer necessary to be patient like all the other motorists caught up in the 7pm snarl up on Nyerere Avenue.

It chose to overtake all vehicles ahead of it and in the process blocked oncoming vehicles and in the end caused a gridlock. But even before the driver indulged in this act of stupidity, the police officers sitting at the back were happily puffing away their cigarettes as they obliviously threw away cigarette bats onto motorists behind them ; never mind that smoking in public or in public vehicles was outlawed several years ago. Paradoxically these are the same officers we have entrusted our lives with to keep law and order.

The failure of our system has allowed the police to be a law unto its self. You give the force the traffic rules to enforce but instead, with the full knowledge of their bosses, make the law a tool to exploit an equally lawless Mwananchi.

This jungle life has taught the matatu driver and his tout one thing; that they don’t need to obey any traffic rule. They will overcrowd and overload their vehicles in the knowledge that the traffic police man will turn a blind eye as long as his hands can be greased. They will over-speed and even kill in the knowledge that nobody will charge them with reckless driving or murder or manslaughter on our roads.

Our lack of seriousness is the reason we can appoint someone like John Michuki to the Ministry of transport and casually transfer him to another minister after we have realized that he has been effective in that department.

In Nairobi, a city with less than 4 million people, we have failed as a country to provide fast, safe, comfortable and efficient public transport system as we have seen elsewhere in other cities in the world with populations many times our size. We have instead surrendered to the uncultured owners of operators such as CITI HOPPA, Kenya Bus Service, MOA and all manner of ill- mannered operators on our roads.

These are the drivers that can change lanes five times in one minute irrespective of the inconvenience they cause to other road users. Yet as they do this, the traffic policemen are there right in front of them either chatting away or busy talking on their mobile phones. This is the scene on Kenyan roads all over the country.

Yes, let us name , shame and even arrest and punish the policemen that cause traffic jams and take bribes on our roads, but in the same vein, let us also name, shame and even punish matatu criminals that annoy, inconvenience, bully and even murder us daily on our roads!

Let us get serious this year. We cannot allow the matatu lawlessness, police corruption and their ineptitude to control our lives. It is even wrong to wait for a Prime Minister in an overseas vacation to come back and solve a matatu strike when we have ministers for Roads, Transport and Internal Security sitting pretty in their offices. Our managers in public offices must perform to earn their pay.
That is the way it is!

jerryokungu@kenyatoday.co.ke