Road discipline solely lacking

 

Many a morning, I watch the build-up of traffic on Thika and Kiambu roads, starting as a trickle at 6.30am and building into big rivers of second-hand Japanese vehicles, like ink through capillaries, until finally the districts of Ridgeways/Garden Estate, Runda and Muthaiga are fully — and painfully – constipated.

Across Thika Superhighway, from these moderately to very affluent neighbourhoods, are the more colourful streets of Mathare North, Lucky Summer, Pangani and Mathare proper, one of the city’s oldest slums.

Along with the vehicles, there is also a steady tributary of humanity, the large part being young men walking to work, mostly on construction sites and the homes of the leafy suburbs which require labour to run.

These young men are blessed with energy and good health and are clearly distinguishable from local residents, whose progress on their morning jog is laboured and, at times, painful.

Hiding among these good folk are a few bad eggs in motorcycles who will stick a handgun under your sweating chin in an attempt to steal a Samsung smartphone.

When these two worlds are brought together, there is, inevitably, some conflict.

Rich people

I am making these observations to drive at two, perhaps controversial, conclusions. First, there is a growing sense in this country that rich people are bad people, they have no rights since they have all stolen their wealth through tenders and other forms of corruption, right?

On the other hand, I sense a strong narrative that the poor have inalienable rights that must be protected from the rich, poverty as a concept is a good thing, it is morally elevating, and that the poor are, invariably, honest and incorruptible and their rights matter more than those of the rich.

These are not my views and I, obviously, strongly disagree with them. They are wrong and based on generalisations which are not useful.

Now, if you live in a wealthier neighbourhood where costs are higher, the lawful enjoyment of your property includes the privilege to exclude others from your life so that your domestic existence is quiet and devoid of the hustle and bustle of the city.

It is bourgeois — perhaps even bougie — but the well-to-do have a right to an uncrowned sidewalk in their leafy suburbs to walk their dogs, push their baby carriers or generally waddle for their health.

Any person who can afford this lifestyle is welcome to it. And those who aspire to it should work hard, make the money and live it.  But these rights have to be explained, accepted and enforced. I shouldn’t have the right to go anywhere I fancy. And my need for convenience should not be at the expense of others’ desire for privacy.

Enforceable regulations

We need to develop a framework to guide the use of public spaces. It should give rise to enforceable regulations. Equally, there must be rules for the use of infrastructure for stuff to work. A road that is just a free for all, use as you please, will be a congested, chaotic place, as ours all are. Which leads me to my second and final point.

Stop the construction of the expressway until we have a conversation about road use. That expensive piece of Chinese engineering won’t help our traffic headache one bit until we appreciate that infrastructure is useless unless its use by the public is regulated.

I’d like to know how many jetliners you would safely land at JKIA if all of us were free to graze our cattle inside the airport and dry our beans on the runway.

Our roads are a chaotic mess. They are virtually unusable; most drivers are incompetent. They can’t safely handle a car at 60km an hour. They don’t now what the lanes are for; they think they are just pretty lines on the road.

Driver education is non-existent, testing and certification a joke.  So you have roads such as the superhighway which are a weaving mass of cars, like maggots, explicably moving this and that way without reason or justification.

The solution to that problem is not to build another road. It is to show people how to drive properly and make sure that they do it. So, pause the building of roads. Show us how to use the ones we have first.

* * *

I watched the departure of former US President Donald J. Trump and the swearing in of President Joseph R. Biden on Wednesday with pleasure.

The Republicans are good for our region because of their emphasis on security; they help us fight terrorism. Agoa was a George Bush thing, even though Barack Obama reauthorised it in 2015. The Democrats are heavy on the soft, cultural agenda and not particularly useful when it comes to hard development and security issues.

But Mr Trump, an out and out racist, was totally unfeasible. He was going to crash the US with his incompetent management and tear it apart with his appeal to racism and violence. Mr Trump had cojones; he confronted and challenged China. However, he may have carried the day in a few skirmishes but there is no way he was going to the war.

Not clever enough and surrounded by a choir of cheer leaders and soothsayers.