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
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