Whereas Transport Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir at the weekend announced plans to “bring back” alcoblow, the correct position is that the tests have never been withdrawn and are administered on drivers in Nairobi every end of week.
Despite this, the number of people dying in road traffic crashes continues to grow, with the latest data from the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) indicating that 1,139 people have died in crashes since January.
This is a sad state of affairs and if left unchecked, the toll from crashes will be higher this year compared with 2024. However, to announce that the government will “re-introduce alcoblow” without resorting to data on crashes amounts to a knee-jerk reaction.
The big problem with road safety today remains inadequate policing and failure to ensure that only roadworthy vehicles are allowed to operate passenger transport, including among motorcycle taxis, also known as Boda boda. In the last three months, boda bodas have claimed the lives of 130 pillion passengers. This is in addition to 301 riders.
Unfortunately, Kenya has come to a point where it is no longer possible to police the motorcycles. In turn, riders have become a law unto themselves, causing an unacceptably high number of road incidents and accidents.
Many of these offenders are not necessarily drunk. They are mostly careless, inadequately trained, and oblivious of rules and regulations that govern motoring.
As such, “bringing back” alcoblow will not stem the deaths arising from such cases. The one big problem with alcoblow is that it has become a tool for traffic police to misuse against the middle class.
Officers set up the tests deliberately to catch motorists with disposable incomes. Their primary aim is not to make roads safer. Far from it. It is to extort money from suspects. The going rate now stands at Sh30,000 for one to be released from custody. This is not law enforcement. It is usury.
What the country needs is a road safety plan that will encompass all aspects of public health and safety, starting with road design, robust enforcement of the highway code and re-education of enforcement agencies to avoid petty corruption and uphold the rule of law.
As it is now, police treat roads like a source of revenue, playing subterfuge with motorists and, in many instances, engaging in activities that are contrary to the law and common decency.
For instance, it has become all too common for buses and minivans to exceed the prescribed speed limits without consequence because traffic police officers are on the take.
It is also not surprising that policing is done between 6am and 9am on most roads because this is the time officers collect bribes from public service vehicles. After that, motorists are on their own. Even when an incident occurs, both the complainant and the offender have to pay the officers before their cases can be resolved.
To argue, therefore, that “bringing back alcoblow” will be the silver bullet that will resolve the chaos on Kenyan roads is to miss the point entirely because these are mounted on routes leading to middle class residential areas rather than on highways where the largest number of fatal crashes occur.
If NTSA is serious about its mandate, it needs to map out the areas that report high traffic incidents and come up with strategies to address the specific problems that make these areas prone to crashes. They, however, cannot do this effectively without using data.
It has, sadly, become routine for NTSA to only collect data about fatalities and injuries while ignoring other critical data points, such as the types of vehicles most prone to crashes, the state of health of drivers (I personally believe there are too many drivers with poor eyesight and they pose a danger to all road users), and weather conditions among other variables.
This is hard work, but it will bear tangible and more sustainable results compared to making roadside declarations about “bringing back alcoblow”.
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