NTSA’s role goes beyond giving accident death toll

On Sunday, eight passengers were killed on the spot when their vehicle smashed head-on into an oncoming truck on the Maai Mahiu-Narok stretch.

In the usual Kenyan casual culture, the deaths will have been treated as normal, yet the accident and the deaths provide incontrovertible evidence that the quality of driving on our roads is so catastrophically low that it’s a miracle motorists and passengers in public service vehicles get to their destinations alive.

We have said it here before that the National Transport Safety Authority has a huge and urgent mandate. It will have failed in its duty and must be judged harshly for sitting on its hands while mortuaries pile up with accident deaths and hospital wards pack with the injured and the maimed.

The NTSA must have an initiative that engages the transport industry long before trips begin. As it is, the NTSA comes to accident scenes as a mortician approaches a mortuary.

The need for a serious approach is needed now more than ever because students head back to school this week and the reckless and stupid rush to make a kill cannot let drivers use their heads.

Save for the PSVs, the greatest contributor to murder on our roads, the boda boda riders constitute a menace that ought to have been tamed years ago, but since the NTSA decided not to bother, they have become law unto themselves testament of which was evident in February when matatu crews staged a one day strike in protest at the harassment they suffer at the hands of bike taxi riders.

The NTSA must act now. Waiting for accidents to happen then providing the death toll cannot be the work of an organisation trusted with the life of motorists and passengers.

Quote of the day: “There is a wisdom of the head, and... there is a wisdom of the heart.” —English writer Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ was first published in the literary periodical All the Year Round in weekly instalments from April 30, 1859