The rise and fall of Nyayo’s buses

By KIUNDU WAWERU

From the 1930s to the early 1970s, public transport in Kenya was without the chaos experienced today. The mode of transport then was buses, which run on schedule, picking and dropping customers at designated bus stops.

This was the era of the Kenya Bus Service, introduced in 1934 by the Overseas Transport Company of London. This would remain the main mode of transport until the 1970s, when there was great demand for upcountry travel.

But in 1986, the country would get a new bus service, which had the markings of a great government initiative and which was hailed joyously.

The Nyayo Bus Service was launched by President Daniel Arap Moi, and some people felt that its sole purpose was to compete with KBS, with which the government did not have good relations.

Christopher Njung’e remembers how in the 1980s, he would walk a long distance from his Ndeiya, Kikuyu home to the Nairobi Nakuru Highway. “There were no buses to our place and we were used to long distances. It would take me over one hour of walking from Ndeiya to Zambezi, where I would catch a bus to Nairobi.”

This would change in the late 1980s, when the ‘DAF’ started plying Njung’es route from Nairobi via Zambezi, (a small town along the Nairobi-Nakuru Highway just after the Sigona Golf Club). The name DAF stuck, in many estates though this was just the make of the green Nyayo Bus. There were other makes including Leyland and Isuzu. Njung’e remembers how the buses were manned by the courteous National Youth Service staff, and were always on time. “If I remember well, there was a 6am bus, 9am, 1pm and 5pm.”

After the launch in 1986, the bus service, run by the NYS, quickly grew so that in 1988 it boasted of a fleet of 89 buses, and made a Sh9million profit according to media reports quoting director, Geoffrey Griffin.

‘White elephant’

The fleet would increase to over 300 vehicles in the 1990s with operations expanding from Nairobi to other regions. However, the success story would sooner turn to despair, and NBS is now remembered as yet another government white elephant.

In 1995, a local daily wrote that of 367 buses countrywide, only 55 were operational with the others “either collapsed or vandalised.”

The NBS had received buses from the Italian, Dutch and Belgian governments. In 1995, the article says that 89 un-built chassis, donated by the Belgium government through a credit purchase scheme in 1990 were stored in the open and were going to waste at the corporation’s headquarters in Ruaraka.

There were corruption allegations involving the operations as some of the said chassis, valued at six million each were sold, others did not have the requisite spare parts and one completely disappeared.

Six years after its birth, majority of the buses would be out of service most of the time, while new ones would sit at the NYS for weeks waiting for official commissioning.

Graduates employed

The corporation employed hundreds of Kenyans from the NYS and  university graduates. As the bus service basked in popularity and profits in the early days the government proposed to build modern houses for the staff.

The National Youth Service Bus Complex was put up in Ruaraka, opposite the Utalii Hotel. It contained six, four storeyed blocks each with eight, two bed-roomed self-contained houses.

There were two other phases, one comprising of 28 staff housing blocks and the third phase to comprise the administration block, a dispensary and a petrol station among other life improving amenities. All this were put up, but soon, the project would stall. This was due to the contractor incurring more expenses than budgeted for, and the treasury was unwilling to fund the surplus. With mounting pressure and increased cost of building materials, Karuri Civil Engineers abandoned the project, leaving the structures open to theft and vandalism.

The last of the green DAFs were seen in 1995, and by then the Nissan 14-seater matatu was already riding roughshod on Kenyans. Unlike the NBS and the KBS, the matatu operated where and when needed, while the buses observed schedules.