‘Art Has Never Caused an Accident’

You’ve got to give it to the President.  His matatu ride last week did exactly what a political stunt should do – it charmed supporters, infuriated opponents, and left everyone scrambling for deeper meaning in what was a simple PR gimmick. The optics were interesting – a matatu populated by the powerful, escorted by a motorcade, with a conductor who takes top marks for keeping a poker face even as he pretended to do his job (and as the most powerful men in politics and business around him were behaving like excited tourists and pulling out their mobile phones to take selfies).

But to me, the big story of the day was not whether the ride was genuine (it passed the message of cashless payment effectively, which was all it was meant to do). It was in the statements President Kenyatta made as he was launching yet another method of paying for your ride that will stick, for a long time.

The Presidential declaration that there would be no prohibition on graffiti art on public service vehicles is exactly the right kind of common-sense public policy that is all too rare in Kenyan public life.

For decades now, fusty policymakers, including the venerated John Michuki, have attempted to criminalise the loud flashiness and psychedelic colourfulness of the vehicles in public service on our roads. It is a policy that is rooted in conservatism – a stuffy refusal to accept that youthful enthusiasm can be expressed in ways that may not appeal to people who last saw the inside of a matatu decades ago. Matatu art is a brilliant thing – with colour paintwork and names that make these vehicles moving billboards of Kenyan creativity. As is usual with us, the flash and dash of our matatus is something we take for granted until we see it celebrated in foreign guide books and on international television channels.

The ostensible reasoning for the constant attempt to ban public art on matatus was devastatingly, and eloquently, dismissed in a report by NTV’s Yvonne Maingey last week. ‘Jose’ Asila, a 25 year-old business owner who designs and executes inventive public art on matatus, told Yvonne that he employs at least 10 young men in his business. His company makes hundreds of thousands of shillings a month making matatus colourful, and this is despite the ever-present threat from the NTSA to put him out of business. Jose says it succinctly – ‘Speed and carelessness cause accidents, [but what I know is that] art has never caused an accident’.

We spend thousands of man-hours, and introduce incredible amounts of inconvenience and bothersome officiousness, in public pronouncements and enforcement of arcane, silly rules. The best examples of these are to be found in our City by-laws for Nairobi. There is a whole category of these called ‘General Nuisance’, and a reading of them would be extremely amusing, except that it often leads to encounters with city enforcers that often do not end well. There are prohibitions on ‘making any kind of noise on the streets’, as well as ‘ playing any game, riding, driving or propelling on a foot path’. In the strictest terms, it means that if you’re walking down Kenyatta Avenue with your five-year-old daughter, who squeals in delight as she skips along the paving stones, you could be arrested on charges of breaking the by-laws. There is even an entire section of the by-laws on the manufacture, display and sale of ice cream.

The point is not to ridicule the Nairobi County – some of the by-laws on pollution and traffic are quite useful. It is that some rules remain on the books to reflect a colonial, conservative mode of thinking that has no place in a dynamic, African society such as ours. And what that mindset leads to is what we saw at the tail end of last year. John Mututho and his National Authority for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse tried to clamp down on private parties, with rules on the need for licensing of get-togethers in private homes. As with any such rules, the putative reason was borne of a heart in the right place (alcohol abuse is an epidemic in Kenya), but the attempted overreach leads to the impossibility of enforcement, and a humiliating walk-back when the public backlash becomes too loud.

Regulation is not in and of itself a bad thing, but the balance to be struck is to not be intrusive and unnecessary. Enforcement of bad rules, or pointless ones, is expensive, cumbersome and only gives scope for corruption and inadvertent lawbreaking.

The President is a constantly criticised man (and lots of this is deserved, by the way), but in this one he walked away a winner in my books. One hopes that we will recognise that, in his application of judiciousness to the matatu question last week, President Kenyatta will blaze a new trail in policymaking in Kenya. Ushering in the Age of Common Sense. 

Also published in the Business Daily on 11 November 2014, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Matatu-artists-don-t-cause-accidents--speed-does/-/539548/2517818/-/qnmfgiz/-/index.html