Everyone has watched the video, unless you’re the only visitor in Jerusalem still shopping for a smart phone so you can enjoy Magical Kenya and all their animals on fours and twos.
The video shows a lady driver being tormented by 16 beasts dressed as humans. It has caused nationwide vomit, prompting bodaboda riders to reassure the insect world that bad apples can be found anywhere, including in leafy orchards.
Any Kenyan who has used a bodaboda to beat traffic jams will tell you that the ride isn’t close to the safest. These riders slalom between narrow metal barriers, graze panicky pedestrians, hoot at innocent traffic lights, and wink at unfit traffic police, daring the officers to catch them if they can. It isn’t the best of human behaviour, certainly not the example examiners would consider for the KCPE Social Studies paper.
That’s why anyone who offers to prune these people’s ears is always going to be our darling. The President has offered to bell the cat; and since then the riders have been taking turns at showing their bruised knees in front of the cameras asking the police to listen to the teachings of Christ and forgive them up to seventy times seven.
It comes as a shocker that bodaboda riders can actually say sorry in public without fearing that society might think of them as weak men. This incident unknowingly helped us turn a corner in breaking down sociocultural stigma surrounding the other gender. Kenyan men are now free to show emotion and carry flowers in public.
While the efforts to bring back sanity on our roads is highly welcome, government officers tasked with mopping the floor should be encouraged to first look at their walls and see the bigger picture.
It’s no secret that Kenya is increasingly becoming a violent society. The government shoots you for not wearing a Sh10 facemask, locks you up in a rickety van for telling people about your wares in a loud voice, and when children ask why a private developer is grabbing their school land, they’re sent a loaded lorry to fumigate them with tear gas.
You would imagine these efforts at mainstreaming law and order cuts across the board, until you turn on your television and find the guy who looted public funds has just been awarded a state medal, and the one who has a PhD in sleeping on the job has been promoted to higher glory.
For a long time, Kenyans have been watching as powerful people got away with high-grade impunity and they’re now asking the waiter to give them a motorbike similar to that one.
The Kenya Police used to be a Force until the 2010 Constitution deliberately compelled them to change into a Service. To be a service means that before you arrest a bodaboda rider, you have to first show him your service badge, ask for a minute of his time, before reading him his rights and wrongs.
In the likely event that the rider declines to cooperate, the officer is at liberty to take down the rider’s ID to trigger the next course of legal action, because it is assumed that every officer knows how to read and write.
You will not reform the bodaboda sector by throwing tow trucks and running batons for every violent incident on the road. These people operate within a larger ecosystem that rewards bad manners and they want to stay competitive because they also have children to feed and mobile loans to repay.
The government prides itself as a frontline fighter of all forms of discrimination and since they’ve been rewarding impunity, they should also let Boda Boda riders be part of their reward scheme without discrimination.
