Speak out in a matatu? You’re damned if you do; you are doomed if you don’t!

August 29th will remain a reference point in matters road safety for the coming months. It is perhaps the irony of the rhetoric that follows such events that is most hurting. It boils down to a blame game between the drivers, police, the passengers and the policy makers who blurt afterward: “This is not an accident! This is murder!”

Interestingly, the passenger has borne the brunt of the blame. “How do you just sit in a speeding matatu and you don’t raise your voice?”

The debate is led by individuals who last rode in a matatu decades ago, or better still, never travelled in one. To regulate the matatu, one needs to have tasted their portion first hand.

The technocrats who end up in most of these taskforces to decide the fate of matatu users wonder how dumb one can be to entrust their lives to a drunk speeding driver without speaking out.

I travel in matatus often (mostly when I am too tired or broke to drive upcountry). In several of these trips I did my patriotic call by speaking out when I felt we were moving beyond 80 KM/H.

As a driver you can feel the speed is at 100 or so, even as the ever creative Kirinyaga Road mechanics fit the matatu with a switch that deactivates the speed governor, only to reactivate it at a police check.

I have been thrown out of matatus so many times for speaking out that I have lost count. Speaking out is not as easy as it sounds, much as I have tremendous respect and support for Toa Sauti campaign. One is damned if he speaks out and doomed if he doesn’t.

The latest was when I travelled from Embu in a Meru matatu. The driver was so high on muguka and was smoking on and off despite my pleas; he insisted he was puffing the smoke outside his window.

The music was intentionally deafening and I had to shout myself hoarse to protest against the speed and why we were stopping to pick more passengers despite there being two extra passengers.

My challenge was not even the arrogant manamba who insisted I should buy my own vehicle if I can’t take the matatu inconvenience but my fellow passengers one of whom insisted they were late and I should alight if I wasn’t in a hurry.

To “punish” me for speaking out and to turn the other passengers against me, the driver slowed down to what I thought was 40 km/h much to the protest of the other passengers.

At one point I insisted we can’t sit four in a row. Assisted by the roadside manambas who help over-load matatus, the tout went ahead to throw me out and my seat was immediately taken up by two fellows who were “cooperative”

Being kicked out was not the problem, being left behind with the “resident” manamba was. It took me hours to get a matatu as the manamba at the stage kept telling every arriving matatu what a nuisance I was, branding me a “civil society guy” who should buy his own vehicles.

It is then that it dawned on me what a paradox this country is in. The policy makers keep thinking speaking out is such an easy thing and that all of us in accidents are fools as we kept quite all along as the driver juggled us between life and death.

Not to be one who points out problems and never has solutions, I beg to be heard on one. Between the police road blocks, hell breaks loose in matatus only for sanity to resume as we approach a road block.

Some passengers and the tout occasionally bypass the road block on motorbikes only to rejoin the rest of us hopeless passengers after the road block. I have never seen a policeman enter the bus to inspect the capacity — they are only interested in talking to the driver and tout for obvious reasons.

My solution lies in law enforcement within and not without the matatu itself. It is high time that law enforcement officers boarded matatus randomly and incognito to documented atrocities committed on passengers and make arrests from within.

Smart phone apps can tell you the speed while you are in the vehicle. Being a witness himself as a passenger, the policeman will make the arrest and also stand in court as witness saving the nation lots of money and time. This is hoping it doesn’t start a cycle of bribery within matatus!

I insist, the problem is not night travel, neither is it good or bad roads. It squarely lies with the madness on the roads and the lacklustre enforcement of the law.

Dr Muiruri is a public health consultant