The ubiquity of boda boda, the motorcycle taxis ferrying both passengers and goods for a fee, stands as a quiet indictment of Kenya’s failed public transport system. Their rise is not a triumph of entrepreneurial ingenuity so much as a symptom of institutional neglect.
The rot set in with the licensing of matatus, privately owned vans that came to dominate urban and inter-county travel. They entrenched informality, crowding out coherent planning and leaving the State to preside over a transport network in chronic disarray.
Kenyans who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s will recall an urban transport system that was orderly, predictable, and by today’s standards, almost austere in its discipline.
Public transport in the cities was not free-for-all but a regulated service, akin to those found in other serious metropolises. Licensed operators worked under clearly defined charters, bound by service-level agreements that specified routes, frequencies and timetables.
Vehicles were expected to be roadworthy and clean; crews were uniformed; fares were receipted. The system treated mobility, not as an improvisation, but as a public good; managed, accountable and dignified.
Kenya’s public transport sector appears to be retracing a path first worn decades ago. As then, the culprit is political expediency masquerading as policy.
The licensing of matatus was presented as a sober technocratic fix: A means to civilise the informal transport sector, improve safety, impose standards and harvest revenue. In practice, it achieved precisely the reverse. What emerged was not order but absurdity; a transport system that bordered on the farcical.
Formal bus companies, unwilling to compete with anarchy, retreated. Politicians, acutely sensitive to the electoral weight of the sector, chose indulgence over enforcement. With the brief and notable exception of John Michuki’s tenure as Transport minister, successive administrations lacked either the courage or the conviction to impose discipline, lest they offend a vote-rich constituency. The result was predictable and entirely self-inflicted.
It should by now be plain that neither the matatu nor boda boda industry will be disciplined by the issuance of fleeting edicts from passing government functionaries.
Years of indulgence and neglect have allowed the public transport sector to metastasise into something close to ungovernable, where the reassertion of law and order has become a forbidding task.
The failure is not for want of episodic resolve. Not so long ago, the Jubilee administration’s omnipotent “super” Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i sought to impose order after boda boda riders publicly humiliated a foreign diplomat over a minor traffic mishap. The episode provoked outrage; the response was muscular; the outcome was negligible. The chaos endured.
More recently, an MP tabled proposals that were, by any reasonable measure, sensible and overdue. He withdrew them almost immediately when confronted by the electoral reality that many of his constituents are themselves boda boda riders. Principle, as so often, yielded to expediency.
The result is now an industry that operates as a law unto itself. Across the country, minor traffic incidents involving boda boda riders routinely escalate into collective vigilantism. Vehicles are torched, tempers rule and the authority of the State evaporates in plain sight.
Rather than endlessly tolerating dysfunction, the chaotic public transport sector should be consigned to obsolescence, replaced by serious mass transit: Trams and underground rail – long overdue, proven and civilised solutions everywhere.
Mr Khafafa is a public policy analyst
