The lawlessness on our roads

The passenger minibus will swing into the road suddenly just as it will stop anywhere, no courtesy of indicating, no regard to the right place of stopping, creating lanes where there shouldn’t be.

These litany of annoying and offending actions have been around us unfailingly. But they keep mounting and piling. The latest trend is to deal with the choking traffic of Kampala by making use of sirens by utterly private individuals with zero justification. Driving on the wrong side of the road now goes on shamelessly, with unbridled impunity. It all comes down to one word:Lawlessness.

A road is a very critical public space. For many citizens, it’s arguably the most important public good. You can’t avoid it. This means there must be adequate road safety, easy accessibility, right state and proper use, among others.

Road works and management, from careful design to detailed layout and defining the rules governing use, have enormous implications for any nation’s state of progress and people’s quality of life.

Engineering and architectural aspects are one thing, observing and enforcing basic rules and laws on the road is another problem altogether. The former is technical, the latter is social and political. Perhaps we can live with a lousy and poorly planned network of roads around Kampala, but how about the sheer lawlessness that reigns on Uganda’s roads.

It all comes down to the quality of government and the extent of rule of law. Any society that lays claim to being ‘modern,’ however one interprets this loaded, has to operate with a set of clearly laid down and enforceable rules.

Any government that purports to exercise power and authority must successful enforce the established rules, do so consistently and without any exceptions. A state as the repository of public authority and whose primary duty is to maintain law and order must as a necessity be able to whip private individuals and compel everyone to act according to laws, rules, norms and acceptable standards.

When exceptions are allowed, starting at the top by allowing an individual to violate the law and offend established rules without sanction, the impunity grows and spreads to engulf the wider public. The problem ceases being one of an errant character who runs the red light or an isolated public figure who drives on a pavement, it becomes fully systemic and pervasive.

The mayhem and menace on our roads have reached epidemic levels. It bespeaks the poverty of the Museveni government and the sheer dysfunction of the current system of rule.

For many years I have engaged in a somewhat solo crusade against passenger motorcycles, boda-bodas. The boda-boda spectre on Uganda’s roads, not just around Kampala, is a sad and painful definition of just how hopeless we have become.

Worst, many Ugandans actually do not see the problem even as it worsens every passing year. Corporatizing bodas has done little to cure an endemic problem. It now appears that doing anything radical and sweeping against the boda industry, even if it’s just basic regulation and streamlining, will likely set off social turmoil and imperil public order considering the limited capabilities of the Uganda state.

Yet, to be sure, the boda-boda epidemic, now associated with road casualties at the national referral hospital, is just but one of the ills eating up the road space. It is not just the boda guy who runs the red light or cuts through the traffic by switching to the other side of the road, police vehicles and all manner of government vehicles are driven with total disregard of the law and common decency.

Human beings are programmed to engage in wrongdoing when chances of punishment are very low or totally absent. If driving on the shoulder ends with a petty bribe payment to a police officer or a speeding offense is resolved by a phone call to a military General or a top police commander, impunity builds up and you get the kind of lawlessness we see all over.

There is an immediate personal payoff and convenience for breaking the law and violating basic rules including unwritten norms. In the long term, however, the disorder, decay and dysfunction of the type we know see in Uganda hurts everyone including the powerful who command convoys with heavy security. One way or the other, things come full circle, the chickens come home to roost.

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