Governors have a duty to boost safety of boda boda operators

Fifteen years ago, upcountry Kenya was a serene mass of land where you could disappear to, away from the madding city crowds. Today, as I have said before, it is a strange concrete-and-steel jungle colonised by Chinese products. First came the gasoline-propelled chain saw. While trees used to be felled in Mt Kenya Forest and other water towers around the country before, it was all on a small scale.

Felling an old tree took long, and hauling the huge logs out of the forest took extremely strong men, who were in short supply. Those were the days when you bit your lower lip and suppressed tears of wonderment at how immaculately the road outside Embu was carpeted by purple Jacaranda flowers, which seemed to be in full bloom all round the calendar. Until this breathtaking marvel of nature was snuffed out by the nagging sound of the Chinese tree-felling contraption.

To be fair, you can’t blame China for it. Besides, many of those things came from elsewhere, but since we now live under the long shadow of Chinese technology, there you are!

After the chain saw came all manner of Chinese gadgetry. But nothing revolutionised village life more profoundly than boda bodas.

Today, even schoolboys on holiday learn how to ride the things. So much that by the time a boy sits his Form Four exams, he has probably been astride the motor bike longer than he has taken reading revision books. The upshot is that where we walked many kilometres on Sunday just to stand outside a shop and watch cars passing, today no one walks even three kilometres any more.

An even uglier effect of this boda boda revolution is that boda boda accidents are too many. I know this only too well. I have lost a relative and friends to boda boda accidents. A week ago, I stood in a hospital ward with children who could hardly do anything thanks to boda boda accidents. I had gone to visit a relative who had to be moved around because the accident section of a major hospital he was rushed to was full.

Of course, not all accidents can be blamed on boda bodas. In the same hospital I visited last weekend, I watched empathetically as a Standard Six girl narrated to a dozen of misty-eyed visitors how a thug in a humongous Toyota Prado hit her and left her in a pool of blood at a roadside on the outskirts of Nairobi and zoomed away into the sunset. As I listened to her pained story, I became aware of just how dangerous speeding – which thrills many Kenyans – can be.

The pain and suffering that some families have to endure just because someone cannot ensure all boda boda riders are well trained and secured and that we all follow traffic rules is an indictment of a country gone cabbages.

Instead of governors blowing taxpayers cash gallivanting around their towns in huge convoys and smiling at obsequious church goers every Sunday and doing not much else, I think it is time we accepted a few home truths. One is that in many parts of rural Kenya, boda boda is not just a part of life, it is life itself.

It keeps many youths employed, many of them with no training or any clue as to road safety.

They zoom around the villages and speed around corners like kamikaze entertainers, leaving a trail of blood and tears when things go wrong. The second home truth is that we cannot leave the work of controlling these contraptions to the police. And it’s not just because of their eternal itch for blood money, for that is what the Sh50 they love pocketing amounts to. It is time a good part of devolved cash went into subsidising the cost of training these young boys and girls in safety measures and the need to realise that the things they ride like wizards on so many broomsticks are potential death traps. For as more of these things find their way to our roads, the statistics can only get grimmer if we don’t do something.