Michuki rules loom in the City as crackdown on rogue matatus is set to begin

Interior ministry in coordination with National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) as well as ministry of Transport and the National Intelligent Service (NIS) are at the verge  seeing the enforcement of Michuki Rules and an overhaul of the public transport sector to make it governable and profitable.

This is in a move to find a long lasting solution on the rogue of the city matatus.

Last weekend, Dr Matiang’i promised to bring sanity to the roads and find a “lasting solution” to road carnage.

Matatus in major towns are currently controlled by unruly gangs, and criminal elements who masquerade as route controllers and who demand cash from matatu crews depending on the number of trips each vehicle makes in a day.

All this happens in the full glare of traffic and regular police who turn a blind eye on matatus and buses flouting traffic rules — in a network of sleaze and palm greasing that goes up the echelons of the police service.

Cleaning out the thugs who have made matatus a law unto themselves will not be easy; the cartels are deeply embedded in the police, the criminal underworld and, in some cases, politics.

“The entire industry has been taken over by gangs and we have nobody to help us,” Mr Simon Kimutai, the Matatu Owners Association chairman, said Wednesday evening.

Matatu owners have, over the years, said they are forced to pay bribes to both the cartels and the police in order to stay in business.

“Every day, a matatu parts with about Sh1,000 as a bribe. We have 80,000 matatus operating on the roads on a single day, meaning they pay upwards of Sh8 million to sustain the gangs,” said Mr Kimutai.

At the moment, Kenya has more than 200,000 registered public service vehicles with Nairobi alone having slightly above 20,000 such vehicles run through a myriad of limited companies and Saccos — an experiment that failed to bring sanity to the industry since its introduction in 2013 when new rules locked out individual PSV owners.

The matatus, according to some insiders, pay an estimated Sh50 billion a year as bribes to stay on the roads. It is this loot that has turned most police officers into millionaires, despite their meagre earnings.

“The gangs are so vicious that they recently killed the owner of a bus in Kayole Estate (Nairobi) after he resisted paying protection fee. In Nairobi, the Country Bus Station is now in the hands of cartels and the bus owners and companies have no say on their investments,” said Mr Kimutai. “The gangs are allowed to operate in the guise of giving jobs to the youth.”

While the new policy measures will be unveiled soon, the transport sector will be given up to November 1, 2018 to comply with all traffic rules which include the provision of seat belts in all buses and matatus, the re-introduction of speed governors and resumption of uniforms for both drivers and touts in order to kick the gangs out of bus stops.

The government will also target all body builders who fail to comply with the new vehicle body structure. This year, a senior NTSA official was quoted as saying that only 322 matatus on Kenyan roads had complied with the body structure standard — which will now be enforced.

While the matatu industry ought to be lucrative, it is estimated to lose Sh50 billion a year to the organised criminal gangs, rogue traffic police officers, county askaris and touts.

Of concern to the country is the recent spike in road accidents. Yesterday, some of the victims of a bus accident in Fort Ternan were buried after a service in Kakamega.

Experts say that traffic safety is turning to be a serious problem in the country with an estimated 13,000 traffic accidents annually and more than 2,600 fatalities.

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