It’s reckless to fall sick at the wrong time in Kenya

By FERDINAND MWONGELA

Kenyans need only to fall sick in convenient times, or fire to only break out at their homes during times when no traffic jam is expected. Anything else, and you risk dying in a traffic jam or losing everything you own — including important documents stored under your mattress — to a fire.

Picture this; a wail cuts through the hum of the traffic jam with the thinly veiled promise of livening up what is otherwise, proving to be very boring commute to some place or other.

Fire engines

The first thing on the minds of many Kenyans is whether it is an ambulance. Fire engines only come to the minds of Nairobians and those in major towns. Many other Kenyans rely on the fire and emergency response services of friendly neighbours with buckets, in case of a fire, or the local mkokoteni as the ambulance.

As the poor ambulance or fire engine driver tries to wail his way through the jam-packed road, drivers hardly pay heed. Wags at the local point out that the drivers will first check to make sure it is not a police cruiser behind them. The police have a way of creating a path from nowhere. Just ask Nairobi’s Outer Ring Road drivers who have ever been slow to ditch their car in a trench when the GSU are escorting top security loads from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

The red berets poke guns at your car a few agile and call you ‘pumbavu’. It makes sensible motorists dive off the road and pay local louts to put their car back on the road after the wailing cruisers have passed.

Anyway, as the life ebbs out of the poor soul in the back of the wailing ambulance and the homeowner across town takes Facebook pictures of his burning house, other drivers on the road worry about when they will get to the local for a beer before heading home. To them, a beer is a matter of life and death and the critically ill chap should have picked better time to collapse, preferably in the middle of the night, or near a hospital.

How else would anyone explain a driver humming to some music or other from his stereo while an ambulance howls behind him?

But we shouldn’t blame the drivers so much, they are probably right up there with matatu passengers who cannot get on a vehicle that does not overlap lest they get to wherever they are going late. It is not strange to hear matatu passengers ordering the driver to overlap and ‘stop wasting people’s time’. That is until the matatu crew overlaps just when a traffic cop is on the horizon and they get reeled in like a fish on a hook.

The impatient passengers, of course, demand their money back and quickly get on the next matatu.