As Monitor shames errant drivers, authorities should unleash kiboko

What you need to know:

Nightmare. All these things happen because there is no price to pay for foolishness on a public road. When officials do not act they normalise errant behaviour. Consequently, we live amidst a nightmare that is all our own making.

The campaign to shame motorists who do idiotic things on our roads, especially on Kampala streets, is on. Nation Media Group outlets in Uganda, including Daily Monitor and NTV, are running pictures and videos of cars operating in the wrong lane — literally and figuratively. In some cases names are provided, especially on KFM, the other Nation Media Group outlet.
Every so often media houses in Uganda do these things. Which is a great public service. If only the authorities followed this lead with a real attempt at enforcing the traffic code. I saw a tweet from an official of Kampala Capital City Authority promising that they will prosecute offenders this time around.
Good, except that prosecution is one part of the deal because we prosecute people who have already done bad things. The key intervention is to prevent bad people from doing terrible things in the first place. On that nary a word.

But let me back up.
The images we are seeing of U-turns in the wrong spot, parking on sidewalks, picking up passengers in the middle of the road, overtaking on the wrong side plus many other offences are pretty annoying. Throw in the craziness of most boda boda riders, and the chaos is complete.
All these things happen because there is no price to pay for foolishness on a public road. When officials do not act they normalise errant behaviour. Consequently, we live amidst a nightmare that is all our own making.

The disorder keeps growing with every passing day of inaction by those paid to act. The madness especially on Kampala roads is a reflection of disorder in other places of public life in Uganda.
Today we ban kaveera, tomorrow the President or some minister suspends the ban to allow for more consultations. You ask yourself how a government can announce such a major policy change without having had comprehensive consultations.

Same with cleaning up the boda boda business. Today we start registering them with a view to regulating their activities so as to reduce their high accident rate, tomorrow the President or some other official reverses the exercise. Oh, maybe they thought Abdullah Kitata would do a stellar job. We know how that has turned out, meaning that there are things only governments can do effectively for the common good.
But when officials turn governing into a popularity contest, it means they lack the courage to do the hard stuff. Hence the hiding behind ‘further consultations, further consultations’. The environment gets polluted while we are consulting. More and more people perish in road accidents while we are consulting.

When the government disappears from certain spaces, crooks and crazies fill the vacuum. Even the much-vaunted security that the President brags about a lot gets compromised given the disarray. Several unresolved killings in recent years suggest that the wheels are loosening and we may eventually careen off our lane, across the island and into the on-coming traffic lane and crashing into a ditch leaving deadly wreckage in our wake.
It is not too much to ask of an elected government to do its job. Order benefits everybody. It is therefore important that we play by the same rules and face the same punishment for breaking or bending them.