The government has announced plans for a massive crackdown on rogue drivers and other road users following an increase in the number of accidents, including those on the recently completed Nairobi Expressway.
Transport and Infrastructure Cabinet Secretary James Macharia yesterday said his ministry has initiated talks with the office of the Inspector-General of Police to crack the whip to reduce the number of fatalities, which have been on the rise.
The CS, in an interview with Sunday Nation , said most of the accidents, including the two that were recently witnessed on the Nairobi Expressway, were largely due to reckless driving.
The accidents, he said, were not a result of the design of the roads as has been argued by some people.
“There is no problem with the design and we are not going to change the design of roads to take into account the responsibility of reckless drivers,” Mr Macharia said.
He said his ministry and the police have embarked on a plan that will see the reintroduction of breathalysers, also known as Alcoblow, the arrest and fining of offenders, as well as increased surveillance by the police and the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA).
The ministry also intends to erect barriers in areas considered black spots for pedestrians and construct additional footbridges and underground terminals on some of the roads in densely populated areas to reduce pedestrian deaths.
Already, in a controversial move that has divided opinion, the ministry has banned public service vehicles from the Nairobi Expressway and announced plans to construct rumble strips near the toll stations to reduce fatalities following the two accidents that happened on the road.
The CS also capped the speed limit on the road to 110km/hr. And besides the expressway, other roads, such as Nairobi’s Outer Ring, have been cited as some of the most unsafe.
But speaking to Sunday Nation , Mr Macharia said the new measures are part of a broader plan by the government to strengthen the already existing laws on road safety, whose enforcement has become a challenge.
“We have laws and regulations which are very robust. What has been lacking is enforcement. Going forward, we shall be taking a very aggressive approach together with the Inspector-General of Police, through NTSA and the Traffic police, to make sure the issues do not recur.
“The Expressway, and for that matter any road in this country, is not done for careless and reckless drivers who are not supposed to be on the roads. I am also glad that the law has been changed to legalise breathalysers. And so NTSA and the traffic police will be back on the road,” he said.
The CS also talked about some of the achievements of the Jubilee administration on infrastructure over the last nine years, some of which will be highlighted in the Afrika Mashariki Transport Awards and Expo planned for next week.
“The Afrika Mashariki Transport Awards and Expo is an event that is set to celebrate excellence in the transport sector and award players who have demonstrated exceptional aspects of efficiency and safety. It will also reflect on President Uhuru Kenyatta’s legacy and what remains to be achieved,” he said of the event where the Nation Media Group is a partner and involves key players in the transport and infrastructure sector.
He added that the renewed push to ensure road safety will touch on the Outer Ring in Nairobi which has been listed by the United Nations as one of the world’s most unsafe.
There have been concerns about the road’s design, with questions on why the authorities cleared it for use despite glaring design and safety flaws.
“For Outer Ring Road, I think it is a special case because it is passing through a very densely populated urban area. The solution to it is that we shall put barriers where nobody can actually cross the road. You have to save your life by walking the 40 metres to the footbridge,” he said.
The Nairobi Expressway, which was last month commissioned for trials, has been the scene of at least two accidents, with one involving an Embasava Sacco bus that rammed a private vehicle on the Mlolongo exit, injuring at least 20 passengers who were onboard.
The accident followed another incident a week earlier when a private motorist rammed several vehicles at the Mlolongo toll station, resulting in the death of the vehicle’s driver.
The government has also been criticised by some for failing to provide convenient entry and exit points on the expressway within the central business district.
Outer Ring, on the other hand, has accounted for most of the road accidents in the capital, with about 44, of the 371 deaths recorded last year, said to have happened on the road. It was followed closely by Waiyaki Way, which claimed 38 lives, and Mombasa Road with 29 deaths.
This comes even as hard questions remain on the repair of Mombasa Road, damaged by the construction of the expressway.
He said the estimation of the cost of the repair, which is scheduled to begin in the next few weeks, remains Sh9 billion, but this would be shared between the government and the expressway contractor.
“Already, an estimate has been done and segmented into two lots. The first lot is damage caused by the expressway, which now is the responsibility of the contractor. And that comes to about Sh5 billion.
“The other bit is the enhancement, which was not done before like drainage, walkways, BRT systems, which are not the responsibility of the contractor. So those works have been assessed and we are just waiting for this new financial year. KeNHA (Kenya National Highways Authority) has already put aside Sh4 billion to start off the work,” he said.
Excerpts from the interview:
If you take roads, for example, we actually fulfilled the promise in the Jubilee manifesto. We gave an ambitious promise to do 10,000 kilometres of roads.
But today, that has been exceeded. We now have 11,500km. In the railway sector, the President commissioned the Standard Gauge Railway for cargo and for passengers.
Mombasa port has also assumed a new stature. When Jubilee took over, it was doing cargo of about 18 million tonnes per year.
As of now, it is 36 million tonnes. In the aviation sector, for the first time, we now have direct flights from Nairobi to USA’s JFK Airport in New York.
The first challenge was how to change the mindset of the people. If you are going to do a project of the size we were talking about, people have to change their mindset quickly.
For example, on this expressway, we only started the discussions over a cup of tea in Beijing and it became a reality within two or three months.
For a long time, the public service has been used to bureaucracy. The second has been about funding.
The third is on how to inculcate the culture of public-private partnerships to bridge funding deficits.
There are two levels of assessment that we use to give assurance that they are not overpriced. Number one is a robust competitive process, involving international bidders who have done projects elsewhere.
Bids must be competitive, you do not prescribe the cost. Number two, even when you do the bidding and you have the winning bidder; you must do a value-for-money assessment, where you look at cost and benefits.
In some cases, we hire independent experts to determine whether we are getting value for money.
Sometimes Kenyans compare projects and say ‘Western Bypass is costing Sh18 billion for 18 kilometres,’ so a billion for every kilometre. That is misleading because no single road is comparable to the other. They are different. Their specifications are different. Every project must be looked at carefully and differently.
In your estimation, what should the next government focus on in terms of infrastructure?
I would really love to see the completion of the existing projects, because what used to happen before, unfortunately, was a lot of wastage, where a new government comes and dumps the whole project that was being done by the previous government.
They should also create an environment conducive to business so that investors can come and put money in the infrastructure space.
What is next for you? It had been rumoured that you were to vie for a seat in your home county of Murang’a.
Let me say that at every stage in life, you have to look at what is best in terms of your contribution to society.
Yes, somebody could have gone for elections, but I would be serving one county out of 47.
And some of the things we do here, we are serving 47 counties. What next, time will tell. If you’d asked me the same question in March 2013 when I was running a bank, I could not have any idea that I was going to join the government.
The ministry is set to host the Afrika Mashariki Transport Awards and Expo from Wednesday to Friday. What should we expect?
That is an important event; it will put transport where it should be. Without transport and logistics, other sectors cannot function; it would be chaos.
So this event is timely as it brings together the integrated perspective that without a robust transport system, we cannot succeed.
I look forward to this event. It will also bring contributors from the global community because transport is not local, it is a global issue.
It has been 10 years of devolution. What would you say counties got right or wrong on infrastructure?
There have been cases where some counties say ‘these are our roads,’ and so another county should not touch them.
But we have one unit called Kenya. The danger of trying to take ownership of certain roads is that you create gaps along the way.
The county borders are just artificial. They are administrative units, not sovereign. We have been challenging our friends within the counties to avoid looking inwards, but outwards.
Does the SGR have a plan for profitability? There have been reports of sales declining over the last couple of months.
SGR is profitable even now. We are doing 14 trains. The breakeven point was eight trains and we are ahead of schedule. And that is why you do not find cargo lying in Mombasa port.
We had an interest from a US firm called Bechtel based on an agreement signed between Kenya and the US so many years ago.
But we negotiated with them to do a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) because we did not want to borrow because of costs, which would have been over $3 billion.
That was the sticking point. We were to borrow from the US Exim Bank, but we said ‘No’ and so we stopped negotiating with them. Other firms have come up and the process is ongoing. We shall never borrow for that road.
We will do the PPP. Maybe in the next six months, we can see something.
