Nairobi News

Half-baked idea. The report that 12 commuters have already died in various accidents, barely a week into the new year is proof that the ban on Passenger Service Vehicles’ night travel was a half-baked idea, says Charles Mugambi. He wonders: “If the logic behind the ban, to minimise road carnage, were to be strictly followed, shouldn’t the authorities also ban day travel as well?”

He says, contrary to the intent, the travel ban, unless revised, will contribute to more accidents as drivers rush to avoid being caught outside the operating hours. It is also becoming apparent that the control will have adverse economic effects, he adds. “The idea behind the travel time control is good, however it needs to be properly thought to avoid more deaths,” he says.

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Sad reality. Governor Evans Kidero’s government should not hoodwink foreign visitors, the kind that has big purses and stay in posh hotels like the Stanely that the city is as clean as a whistle, says Mildred Kinoti. “The sad reality is that only the city centre can be classified as clean as it is swept religiously, even on Sundays,” she notes. The rest of the streets, she adds, become dirtier as one get’s out of the CBD, towards the estates.

But she says there is an exception to this outward manifestation of garbage collection negligence when it comes to similarly posh estates like Kileleshwa and Muthaiga where the visitors are likely to frequent during their stay in the county. She concludes that the only true indicator of cleanliness in the city is that street in an Eastland eastate.

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Class-based society. Salim Kajembe says the commentary by Governor Evans Kidero linking the poor performance of public schools vis-a-vis the continued exemplary score of private school learners to the likelihood of creating a class-based society was spot on. That of the 1,032 pupils who scored more than 400 marks out of 500 in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exams, only one was from a public school should worry us all, he says.

“Whichever way you look at it, these pupils already have a head-start in the race for life’s plum opportunities,” he observes adding: “The governor’s decision to call for a conference to deliberate on the future of the county education is therefore timely and laudable.”

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Old ways. If the reported gunning down of close to 10 suspects within the first week of the year is anything to go by, it seems the police have decided to carry on with their old ways in the new year, says Adiel Nyabega. Some of the suspects, he says, were sprayed with bullets for offences minor offences as mugging.

“Those are 10 families that were denied justice by trigger-happy police officers,” he says. Nyabega adds that it is worse that the officers are acting on Inspector General of Police David Kimaiyo’s shoot-to-kill directive and in so doing subverting the course of justice. “2014 must be the year we put an end to this prosecutor-judge mentality among our officers,” he says.

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