Take action to keep avoidable ferry deaths at bay in future

After the April 29, 1994 Mtongwe accident, one would have expected that ferry services would be much safer today.

But Kenya Ferry Services (KFS) appears to have learnt little from this disaster which claimed the lives of 272 people after an overloaded ferry capsized just 40 metres from the mainland.

The ferry, whose capacity was 300, had 400 people on board.

Sunday’s drowning of 35-year-old Mariam Kighenda and her daughter, 4, shows that KFS has done little to improve the safety of its vessels 25 years after the Mtongwe tragedy.

Ms Kighenda and her daughter lost their lives after their car plunged into the ocean because of a faulty ramp.

Expectedly, the accident has brought to question the safety of ferries, and particularly those on the Likoni crossing, which carry more than 300,000 pedestrians and 6,000 vehicles daily across the channel. The ferries are said to have dangerously sagging and rusty ramps.

Besides having a defective ramp, MV Harambee, which Kighenda had boarded, does not have a safety mechanism that would have prevented the car from sliding into the ocean. It is clear that enough is not being done to protect the lives of commuters.

That is why the public anger over the tragedy is understandable.

Predictably, KFS management announced it would rehabilitate three old ferries to mininise the possibility of vehicles falling off them as was the case with Kighenda’s car. He also promised to phase out the old ferries in the next five years. Further, he pledged to intensify public awareness campaigns to improve safety of ferry users.

That is good. However, it is unfortunate that it has taken a fatal accident for the management to wake up from its slumber.

But that is the practice in this country. It takes a tragedy for officials to do what they should have done ages ago. The collapse of Precious Talent Academy, for instance, has reminded the Government that many other schools are time bombs and so there is a flurry of activity to remedy the situation.

In the case of KFS, the situation is even worse because coxswains are reported to have complained about the safety of the ferries but no action was taken. In other words, the deaths of the mother and her daughter could have been averted had KFS employees done what they are paid to do.

Matters are not helped by KFS’s poor preparedness. For an agency that plies its business in an ocean you would expect it to have enough rescuers, including divers, in every ferry.

The death of Kighenda and her daughter should serve as the final lesson for those who run KFS.

The agency now needs to put its house in order to ensure that such avoidable deaths never happen again.

Meanwhile, those who have dropped the ball should be punished.