The many rapid thing on Kenya’s roads is a car called Google.
It is so discerning that, if we press a hunt symbol for “Kenya Traffic Act”, in reduction than half-a-second, it can find 762,000 references.
Remarkable. But not helpful. It can take hours not (!) to find a elementary though elemental fact. What a motoring open wants and needs is quick, elementary and transparent information, here and now.
Not a information towering a distance of a Himalayas hidden in an inflexible haze of errors, omissions and half-baked decrees.
What’s indispensable is a singular lawful site. One that sets out all a laws, rights, responsibilities, systems and correct processes for each stakeholder on each aspect of highway transport. It should have a possess particularly inner hunt engine, so a pivotal word delivers an present and undeniable hivyo, ndivyo ilivyo.
That is what “transparency” means. That is what underpins “accountability”. That is what assures probity and develops a mutual honour that leads to softened conduct.
Anything reduction is a smokescreen of siasa and scam; a vacant coupon for roadside rogues; a grist of motoring gossip mills; and a carcinogen of ongoing violation and misapplication visited on Ordinary Mo.
INVESTMENT
The effect of those patterns can be totalled in trade jam man-hours, repairs correct bills, injuries and deaths. So it is opposite those effects that a value of investment in a singular and extensive website could be calculated.
The calming routine competence take some time, though a coercion and efficiency and cost-benefit are self-evident.
And while we’re waiting, a frankness of routine vigilant could be many extended by stealing a breach on filming or voice recording nearby yellow spikes; an early construction of what constitutes “evidence” of an corruption (eg speeding); and an reason of a “powers” routine that gives a roadside deputy a turn of management (and intensity income) that would be a enviousness of an emperor.
Another useful halt magnitude — until due regulations have been entirely designed, tested, assessed, explained, disseminated and upheld into law by entirely approved processes (and placed on a all-knowing website with a date) — competence be to emanate them as “guidelines” instead.
The unequivocally good news in this honour is that worldwide, via motoring history, a many critical manners have been many effective when and where they have started as recommendation corroborated by open preparation campaigns.
By a time they pass into law, they already have such open bargain and correspondence that coercion is roughly redundant.
As a prosaic example, before a direct creates carrying a draw wire compulsory, with a chastisement for default, competence it be a good thought to conclude what a draw wire is?
And what determines a design? And how it should be used? And how lethal it can be if a wrong wire is used for a wrong pursuit or in a wrong way?
If a chairman creation a order does not already know a answers to all those factors (and many some-more not listed here), a law should not be made.
And if a answers are known, they should be published… good in allege of any authorised charge to a highway emperors.