Kenya’s Roads: More Hindrance than Help
Here’s the latest dispatch from Peter Vigneron, in Kenya on behalf of the KIMbia Foundation.
There is a tremendously important article in the May/June issue of The Boston Review by the Berkley development economist Ted Miguel. In a meditation on Africa’s encouraging growth rate since 2000, Miguel argues that, for the first time in 30 years, African economies appear to have broken free of stagnant or even regressive growth rates. In the development world, this is big news, and Miguel’s article is one part of a trenchant discussion among economists who are trying to sort out why Africa is beginning, finally, to recover.
But the article caught my eye for another reason. Miguel opened with a description of Busia, a border town in western Kenya that has begun to cash in on trade between Kenya and neighboring Uganda. Busia now has ATMs, car rental businesses, supermarkets and, critically, Miguel writes, “the road from Kisumu, the economic hub of the region and Kenya’s third largest city, to Busia ha[s] become a paved, two-lane highway all the way to the border.”
Miguel’s is a remarkable observation, both in that a major road in Kenya is today well paved, and that in Kenya, the jewel of East Africa, something so basic as a proper highway is cause for celebration. And it is.
The Kisumu-Busia road is one of a few good highways in Kenya. Travelers headed from Nakuru to Kabarnet also will not find potholes, though they may similarly fail to encounter any other cars—the route conveniently links two homes of former Kenyan dictator Daniel Arap Moi, and is ignored by most commercial and even passenger vehicles. Besides Kisumu-Busia and Nakuru-Kabarnet, there are some other good stretches of road, but they’re difficult to find and don’t often last more than 10 or 15 miles. More typical is the road north from Nairobi, the main artery bringing goods from the capital to the cities of Rift Valley Province and beyond to Uganda, which is disastrous. In some stretches, drivers avoid the road itself and follow dirt tracks alongside the potholed and crumbling pavement.
Good roads are good for trade, but Busia’s new road was likely a product of economic growth rather than a cause. I’m told that the smooth, wide roads in Narok District, home to the Masai Mara game reserve, are funded by tourist dollars, and, as Miguel writes, Busia is clearly benefiting from the successes of Kenyan and Ugandan interdependence. But in other regions, the majority of regions, the cost of bad roads to Kenyan society is staggering. Driving 20 miles from Eldoret to Iten takes 45 minutes, a major expense with gas in Kenya over $7 a gallon. Flat tires are commonplace. Suspension systems cannot possibly last—in working condition—more than a few thousand miles. These are major costs to a developing economy, and frustrating and unnecessary costs.
Yet the the real price of Kenya’s bad roads is paid in human lives, not in fuel or vehicle repairs. Each year thousands of Kenyans die in traffic accidents (the government reports around 3,000 deaths annually, but the World Health Organization assumes significant underreporting in most developing nations, and presumably Kenya too) and traffic fatalities occur, per registered vehicle, at a rate 20 times that of the United States. Pedestrian deaths account for nearly half of all fatalities; in the United States the figure is closer to 12 percent.
Driving in Kenya is terrifying. Even the best roads are too narrow, and all are trafficked as heavily by pedestrians and cyclists as they are by cars. The safety features of American roads—stop lights, speed limits, lane marking, warning signs, traffic enforcement—which are almost banal in their ubiquity, are nearly absent in Kenya. Because transit takes so long, when road conditions are good, drivers proceed at wildly excessive speeds. Since March, I have witnessed or heard first person accounts of 4 fatal accidents. Weekly I read about a major crash in The Standard or The Nation—typically when an overloaded matatu, or taxi, has suffered a flat tire and careened into oncoming traffic and killed five or six or 10 people. On two occasions I have seen the charred remnants of tanker trucks sitting forlorn and forgotten in deep ravines by the side of major roads; in May I was a passenger when the vehicle I was traveling in hit a pedestrian (at low speed).
It may seem strange to write about car crashes in a country battling AIDS, hunger, illiteracy. But these problems are less visible to prying eyes, and it may be that the governmental neglect of transportation infrastructure is in fact representative of its neglect of the entire spectrum of social problems affecting millions of Kenyans each year. In 2003, President Mwai Kibaki declared his willingness to tackle the roads question and limit the corruption that allows government officials and contractors to pocket money and leave roads in disrepair. If Kibaki was sincere, his initiative has been slow in coming. Worse, it is almost as if, by maintaining his personal highway, former President Moi is publicly acknowledging the billions of dollars he looted while in office, or the members of Parliament, riding in their Mercedes and Land Rovers, are acknowledging that driving safely in Kenya requires extraordinary vehicles. Few seem concerned that government serves itself first and Kenya last.
I wonder if there is another dimension to the issue of roads, however. At the intersection of traditional Kenya—small farms, big families, village culture—and the new, rapidly growing Kenya—of satellite television, Lexus SUVs, and high-rise office buildings—we find that here the value of human life has not yet synced with the swiftness by which a speeding car erases a person from the earth. Or, perhaps, at the margins, where the modern car and its modern driver encounters those Kenyans still hovering within a society that has changed so little in hundreds of years, there is resentment for the old ways, perhaps even hatred. When a driver clips a cyclist at 70 miles an hour, or swerves too wide around a pothole and catches the drunkard who didn’t jump quite quickly enough, maybe he is unconsciously doing his part to bring Kenya into the 21st century.
These are uncomfortable ideas. They do not seem in line with the Kenyan people I know, who are among the most gracious and caring individuals I have ever chanced to meet. But I cannot decide what to think. It is inconceivable to me that the drivers of these modern cars have yet internalized the corresponding appreciation of human life. If they had, they would have slowed down.
In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, former Bogota, Colombia mayor Enrique Peñalosa said that when a city planner or a politician builds a good sidewalk, he or she is “constructing democracy,” because in developing nations most people do not drive. I imagine that the relationship is slightly different—maybe sidewalks are themselves signs that democracy has taken hold, that citizens can demand a safe place to walk and find that their leaders are listening, or that an effort is made to safeguard life even if it has never been safeguarded before. This was supposed to be the role of government—to serve people.
Africa, or at least Kenya, is developing, and I agree with the unstated premise of Dr. Miguel’s piece, that we in the West should want Africa to develop. It just seems that within this bizarre form of accelerated growth—where many Kenyans sleep on dirt floors and under grass roofs, and other Kenyans fly to Europe for medical care—some essential priority has been lost in the scramble.
