Driving in Kenya Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

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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.

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