Riding a donkey: The way to beat frustrating Nairobi traffic jam

Like all aspiring, would-be wealthy places, Kenya has a problem with traffic. But we are starting from the middle, so let’s go back a few years. Back in the day, buying a car in Kenya was almost criminal for those outside of politics. Cars were the ultimate status symbol -- if you had a car in Kenya in the 1970s or 1980s, you truly had ‘arrived’.

Basking as we were in the reflected glory of the immediate post-colonial boom days when land and money and mates were all to be had with abandon, the government of the day decided that having every Kamau and Wafula running around driving cars was bad manners.

And so in came the punitive taxes that put cars out of reach for most ordinary folks. Blinded by their desire to keep the status symbols to themselves, the authorities of the day failed to see the impact: the petrol sector never grew; roads were starved of funds for development and expansion; the matatu menace grew from an innocent curiosity into the hydra-headed monster it is, and we ended up beholden to various public-transport gangs, with corruption, murder and mayhem riding shotgun just for good measure.

As always happens in poor, badly-run places, the authorities realised sometime in the 1990s that their policy wasn’t working. Out went the taxes – but only those on used cars. The result were once again unforeseen. Kenya’s vehicle importers, who all along had struggled to survive in an over-taxed market, suddenly had to compete with cheap mitumba cars from overseas.

Most simply folded, unable to fight the cartels that, even with this lax import regime, still found ways of dumping Uganda-bound untaxed cars into Kenya.

These days, Nairobi wags allege that the easiest way to get a big, fat car in Kenya is to import it using a friend’s Ugandan passport, then quietly pay off some clerk in the right office to have the car registered in Kenya. That’s how we roll.

At any rate, the end result of all this madness has been that we have too many cars and too little in the way of taxes and therefore roads. And so big-city governors are coming up with innovative but sometimes totally crazy initiatives to ease traffic flow.

Nairobi was just getting used to the mapipa initiative, the ubiquitous concrete-filled drums that had blocked off most of the city from the rest of the city, before they were ‘suspended’.

The result had been traffic tailbacks of biblical proportions: city dwellers reported taking 10 hours to drive two kilometres. With this sort of traffic, wananchi needed things to do in their cars while they waited for the traffic to melt away. Here are some of the things they could have gotten up to!

The most obvious thing to do was to curse whoever dreamt up the measures causing the tailback in the first place. But this didn’t help, so the other most obvious thing to do, was to purchase a donkey.

With traffic stretching for miles around the city, and the city itself overgrowing with weeds thanks to abundant rains, overflowing garbage – which is just fertiliser in disguise – and soil all over, the donkeys would have abundant pasture.

Nomads have been known to herd their cattle to the city to graze, so you wouldn’t have lacked food for the equine. If this didn’t suffice, you could have tried tweeting. If you don’t have a Twitter account, where have you been living? Everyone in Nairobi, from the governor to the mama mboga, has a Twitter account.

Twitter makes people look and sound sophisticated (Facebook makes you look stupid and starved of attention), and venting your frustrations on Twitter makes you look and sound suave and urbane.

And for the nasty souls who were unmoved by all these passive measures – well, you could have crashed into the car ahead. With everyone crawling at 2kph, there was no risk of serious injury if you gently nudged the fella in front. It would have at least made the traffic jam interesting!