By Tony Ngare
KENYA: If you are a regular driver in any of the country’s major towns, no doubt you have encountered a good number of profoundly selfish and senseless drivers who make the roads a harder place to be. These are the ultimate idiots.
If you are driving on the dual carriageway, on the right, the lane that would usually be used for overtaking, but you are moving so slowly that everyone else overtakes you from the left, you are a potential candidate for this brand of idiocy.
The engineers who design roads spend five years at the university, and know their work. So when they allocate a lane for slow moving vehicles and one for faster moving vehicles, they must know a thing or two about easing road congestion.
Juvenile conduct
Another category of fools are those drivers who drive slowly, but the minute you indicate and express your intention to overtake them, they slam down on the accelerator. This is clearly juvenile conduct on the road, and there is a reason why our systems insist that for one to be certified as a driver, you must have attained universal suffrage.
You are in a shopping mall parking lot and you sight a vehicle backing out of a slot. There is another motorist patiently waiting to park in the vacated spot, but you fancy you can dash and ‘squeeze in’ ahead of him or her. If this describes your behaviour, then you are another brand of dimwit, even if you think of yourself as a suave driver.
If you have the habit of throwing plastic containers, cans and all manner of trash out of the window as you cruise on the highway, you are a high profile jerk.
Nightmare
Your thoughtless conduct is a twofold nightmare. One, the stuff you throw out of the window could easily land on someone’s windscreen and lead to an accident. In addition, society assumes that by the time you have marshalled resources to acquire a car, you are somewhat refined and would find it abhorrent to violate our environment in such a manner.
There is a certain cadre of motorists who think that the traffic policemen and women are a bother on the road. Granted… the boys and girls in blue are far from saints, but every profession has its shortcomings.
Yet these officers serve an important function. Wait until you are involved in an accident and you will appreciate their worth. So, when you show open disrespect to them, it is unfair, and qualifies you to be a moron.
There is usually the greatest law, building, road or mountain and, needless to say, there are the greatest lunatics of them all. In my books, these are the ruffians who will not dim their headlights at night. These fools do not realise that by blinding you, they are also subjecting themselves to danger since, once blinded, you could end up veering towards his or her path, with a catastrophic end.
I could go on and on, but I have run out of space.
