Eleven Kenyatta University students were killed in a horrific crash on Monday when their bus collided with a truck on a busy Mombasa highway after skidding in heavy rain. Another 42 were seriously injured.
The crash was one of the worst in Kenya so far this year and cemented road traffic crashes as a leading killer in the country.
Speaking in Kisumu West on Tuesday, Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki made the point rather dramatically when he said the number of road traffic crash fatalities in a year in Kenya has surpassed that of people who died from Covid-19 between 2020 and 2022.
The pandemic claimed 4,600 lives in two and a half years but, in contrast, according to figures by the National Transport and Safety Authority (NSA), 4,324 people were killed and 18,561 injured in road crashes in Kenya last year alone.
But that still does not tell the whole story of the tragedy of road crashes in Kenya, and Africa. According to 2023 data from the World Health Organization (WHO), Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s region most affected by road crashes with a fatality rate of 27 per 100,000 inhabitants. That is thrice Europe’s average of nine and well above the global average of 18.
In Africa, traffic deaths account for about a quarter of the global number of victims, even though the continent has barely two per cent of the world’s vehicle fleet, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Road Safety, Jean Todt, said last year.
In January last year, two bus crashes in Senegal made grim headlines, claiming 62 lives. The UN noted that in nearby Côte d’Ivoire, the daily number of fatal road crashes last year rose to 46 from 12 in 2012.
Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death among African youth. They have become a weapon of mass destruction against Africa’s young people and, deeper in that disaster bracket, are taking a higher toll on the continent’s middle- and working classes.
Road crashes are also now the leading global cause of death amongst children and young adults aged five to 29.
And they impose a high economic penalty: The World Bank puts the cost of road crashes at eight per cent of Senegal’s annual GDP and 7.8 per cent of Côte d’Ivoire’s. On the whole, road deaths and serious injuries cost Africa more in GDP than any other continent — about nine per cent.
The WHO attributes the sharp drop in road fatalities in middle- and high-income countries to increased safety efforts — the development of safer infrastructure like cycling lanes and “better” legislation on speeding, seat belts and vehicle standards.
The conventional wisdom is that similar efforts and zealous enforcement (may corrupt traffic cops burn in hell) would bring a lot of good in Africa too.
This sounds particularly promising if one considers that a 2018 WHO report found nearly half of the 54 countries in Africa had no speed laws or speed limits in place.
There is no doubt that better infrastructure, traffic law enforcement, newer vehicles (Africa imports the highest percentage of used cars) and more driver sanity will reduce deaths. But it won’t be enough.
If this level of traffic death came from something young people were drinking, governments would have banned it by now. One can’t ban cars, boda boda or outlaw pedestrians, however.
One thing that would make a huge difference, though, is to ban two-way roads. Let all roads be one-way.
Once you put African drivers on two-way roads where they have to contend with oncoming traffic along the same piece of tarmac, you are courting disaster and creating business for coffin makers.
That would reduce crashes but it is not enough. The way we have built our infrastructure and structured our cities doesn’t work at a fundamental level.
Additionally, the fact that so many young people die in traffic crashes is a result of other forces, including demography.
Many young Africans have flooded public spaces, circulating in them as part of their broader engagement with the economy, and these areas weren’t built to handle their numbers.
One of the more productive approaches would be to shift to trains (and ensure they never have to cross a road with traffic or, even, cows). Better still is to get off the ground entirely and move to underground trains — although I can foresee how a time when that, too, might end in mega tears.
The best bet would be to get most people entirely away from behind the wheel of a train, bus, matatu, regular car and, if magic was real, the handlebars of a boda boda. And so, we come to the great irony.
Driverless cars and trains are just what the doctor ordered for Africa — although it is the continent that doesn’t make any, doesn’t have any infrastructure built for them yet and is too poor to afford them.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. @cobbo3
