St. Michuki

The fallacy at the core of the matatu industry. Published in the Business Daily on 5 November 2013 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Returning-Michuki-rules-a-good-wish/-/539548/2060022/-/item/0/-/82lkn0z/-/index.html

If ever there was a recently-departed Kenyan slated for secular sainthood, the long-serving administrator and politician John Michuki would surely be it. He served for five and a half decades at the helm of many public and private institutions, but he will forever be remembered with gratitude for the accomplishments of a few months of his public life. His signature public transportation reforms at the beginning of 2004 turned the matatu industry upside down, and brought a certain measure of safety and order to the infamously chaotic sector.

I’m afraid, though, that Michuki’s deification may be premature and not fully deserved. And thus, also, everyone calling for a return of a Michuki figure to tame the ‘public’ transport sector in Kenya has their heart in the right place, but their intellectual rigour may not have come along.

The explanation for my heresy lies in those little quotation marks around the word ‘public’. The mass transportation industry in Kenya is anything but public, and therein lies the reason why urban transport in Kenya cannot be tamed using current structures and methods.

Anyone who tried using matatus in February 2004 remembers the nightmare. Mr. Michuki had dug in (and gamely tried on a seatbelt in one of the few complying matatus – but then quickly jumped into his Mercedes on his way to the office). Matatu owners and crews were also sullenly dug into their positions, saying that the new rules were expensive to comply with, and would lead to a lowering of profits or an increase in fares. And indeed, fares rose (the little detail public memory tends to forget about the era). The fact that Michuki won out (and that we’re back trying to recreate his methods) speaks less about the incompetence of current administrators than to the contradiction at the heart of the matatu sector.

This contradiction is that matatus are privately owned, yet we demand public outcomes from them. This is something that no amount of legislation, good wishes or pronouncement can ever solve.

Matatus do serve a certain very crucial service in urban environments. They transport millions of people daily, keeping the economy humming along. Young people in education institutions would not be able to go to school, without access to readily-available, relatively inexpensive and reasonably reliable vehicles to transport them back and forth.

However, we make demands on matatus that cannot be met when they are run by operators whose primary aim is to make profits. We ask that they are available at any time (including early in the morning and late at night, and during the midmorning and mid-afternoon doldrums when there’s little demand for them). We ask that they are present where they are needed (including on stops and routes where there may be minimal demand). We want them to be reasonably driven (i.e. no rushing about with the aim of maximising revenue at the times of peak demand). We complain when they respond to economic forces of supply and demand and raise and lower fares according to the prevailing circumstances.

Nairobi and Mombasa made a crucial, donor-driven mistake when they got rid of publicly-owned and –funded urban transport sectors. Gikuyu slang for the old Kenya Bus Services was ‘muthubari’ (a corruption of the English term ‘municipality’), which is how the vehicles were owned and run.

I have been in the Washington DC area for the past week or so, observing how the Reston and Herndon, Virginia urban areas are run. The area, which is one of the wealthiest in the United States, is chockfull of technology companies, financiers and federal government contractors. The highways are full of Porsches, Audis, Mercedeses, BMWs and (luxury, electric) Teslas. But everyone I have spoken to, from US Congressmen down to city managers and business owners (the very people who own the luxury vehicles) is bursting with pride about the new, multibillion-dollar subway system that will serve the area and onward to the Dulles Airport nearby. They all profess that one of the key things that will keep the Northern Virginia Technology Corridor competitive is the fact that the workers, investors and government-types who frequent the area will be able to hop onto the train. The area will thus be able to stave off competitors from Europe, the Middle East, Asia and (now, increasingly) Africa.

Yet, in Kenya, there has been no serious thought discussed by any county government of setting up a model urban transport sector owned and run publicly. Central government is also tinkering around the edges of managing urban transport, making the fatal error of seeking public benefits from private providers.

So I propose that we put the canonisation of John Michuki on hold, until someone actually recognises that what he accomplished was a tiny bit of a much larger revolution.