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Driving in Kenya Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
www.nytimes.com
Driving in Kenya Can Be Hazardous to Your Health By MARC LACEY NAIROBI, Kenya, April 26 - Why did the chicken cross the road in Kenya? Who knows? But they do so with monotonous regularity, with a squawk, a thud and a flurry of feathers on the windshield, contributing to the country's reputation as one of the most dangerous places to drive in the world. Chickens are by no means the most dangerous obstruction found on Kenyan roadways. There are also, to name but a few, donkeys, pushcarts, rickety bicycles loaded to the hilt and barefoot children in full sprint. Put all that together with speeding motor vehicles and the result is a terrifying obstacle course for the uninitiated. In Kenya, fast-moving tractor-trailers surge straight at oncoming cars, forcing them to the shoulder. Minibuses dart back and forth in traffic, with the limbs of passengers jutting out of open windows and doors. Bicyclists cling to any back bumper they can grab for a free ride. Not surprisingly, the chaos regularly ends badly. Kenya estimates that it loses about 2,600 people a year to road accidents, a rate of just over 55 deaths per 10,000 motor vehicles, which is alarmingly high for a country with a population of 32 million. By comparison, the United States has a rate of just over 2 deaths per 10,000 motor vehicles. The thousands of Kenyans who are maimed on the roads fill hospital beds that are needed for other patients, officials say, and sap some $76 million from the country's struggling economy. Increasingly, however, Kenyans have begun calling for an end to the carnage. Traffic safety is becoming the fad, with public education campaigns urging speeders to let up on the gas and with lawmakers trying to impose a few restrictions. Talking on cellphones while driving is now banned in Kenya, although that did not stop one hurried caller from swerving around a pedestrian at full speed the other day. Of all the voices urging drivers to slow down, none is more persuasive than that of Mary Mwangangi, the traffic commandant of Kenya's Police Department and one of the most vocal advocates for road safety. "I want to see road safety taken as seriously as AIDS," Mrs. Mwangangi said. "It kills just like AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis. We ought to be talking about road safety just as much and teaching children about it. We ought to be fighting it just like those diseases." Road safety is more than a professional issue for Mrs. Mwangangi. She denounces unsafe roads from a wheelchair. A traffic accident put her there. "I used to talk about road safety but I didn't feel it," she said. "Now my body aches. When you're involved in one, it changes everything. Since my accident, road safety has become the most important issue to me." It was a head-on collision in March 2003 between Mrs. Mwangangi's police vehicle and a speeding truck that opened her eyes. She usually wears a seat belt, she said, a habit she picked up while working for six years at the Kenyan Embassy in Washington. But she did not have it on at the time of impact. Mrs. Mwangangi hit the dashboard hard. She broke both legs and both arms in the crash. She now attends regular physical therapy sessions and is slowly healing. She dreams that she will walk again. As for driving, she is not certain she wants to get back behind the wheel. "If I drive again, I'm going to be a very frightened driver," she said. "Even now, when I'm in the car, I keep telling my husband, 'Watch that vehicle! Watch that one!' I have a phobia now." But she also has a passion. She spoke at a recent rally in Uhuru Park here, using her personal story to urge others to slow down and buckle up. "I would probably have suffered less severe injuries if only I had my seat belt on," she said at the event, sponsored by the World Health Organization. Although she is still on disability leave, Mrs. Mwangangi said in a recent interview that her mind remained hard at work. She wants money for more radar detectors and Breathalyzers, which are in short supply. She wants Kenyans to understand the meaning of jaywalking. She wants road safety to become as much a part of the educational curriculum as AIDS prevention. The task that she and others have taken on is monumental. Across Africa, babies still crawl on dashboards and bus drivers accelerate on turns. The roads are still a hodgepodge of divots, holes, ridges and bumps. And those are the portions that are paved with asphalt. Kenya's government has begun an overhaul of the road network, about half of which it estimates is in need of urgent attention. Corrupt contractors wasted huge sums in the past. What looked like shiny new roads that would last for decades were really mirages. Potholes appeared at the first rains. Trucks sank into the substandard asphalt. Light-fingered Kenyans have exacerbated the problem by stealing road signs. Wooden ones are used as firewood, metal ones are twisted into grills. "We need to teach people that stealing the signs is a serious offense," Mrs. Mwangangi said. The babies on the dashboards and the toddlers with their heads out the windows - that is what riles Dr. Sidney Nesbitt, a pediatrician who is one of the founders of an organization called Child Road Safety Kenya. He has had to convince some colleagues that road safety is as pressing a health concern as diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition. All he had to do was look at some of the emergency cases that come to his office to know he was on the right track. "We've had one child thrown through the windshield," he said. "We had another who fell out the door and the father just drove over him." The government of President Mwai Kibaki, who himself was severely injured in a traffic accident during his 2002 campaign, has begun taming the biggest threat to Kenya's roads. John Michuki, the transportation minister, issued a decree requiring the commuter minibuses that operate here - usually with reckless abandon - to install seatbelts as well as devices that limit their speed to about 50 miles per hour. "We're moving in the right direction," said Naftali Obiri, 58, a retired bureaucrat who endorses the crackdown on the commuter vans. "You used to see passengers hanging out the door. Not anymore." He was speaking from Kenyatta National Hospital, where he was nursing wounds that he suffered in a traffic accident. -- No mail, please. |
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