Why the traffic massacre on Uganda’s roads: The one reason no one talks about

So, according to early data, operation Fika Salama has stopped (at least for now) the carnage on Kampala-Masaka Road.

The car accident deaths on Masaka Road had become so high, one recent AFP account suggested it was the most dangerous in the world, after Bolivia’s Yungas Road, a notorious mountain pass better known as “Death Road.”

There are many things that have been blamed for the slaughter on Masaka Road. As the AFP report noted, “Witchcraft, poor roadwork and dangerous driving — all have been blamed for the killer highway whose users will often turn to prayer before taking the road.”

Even if all those things were true, and indeed we pay State authorities and the traffic police to ensure safety, the operation Fika Salama raises a broader question; why should the police have to intervene to stop people from killing themselves? Why can’t Ugandans just drive safely out of an intelligent choice for self-preservation?

There are many readers who will have had the experience in travelling in parts of the world where, without risk of being caught or reprimanded, drivers still respect traffic rules. I have been to rural parts of the US and Europe, and you are driving in a remote part, basically in the village.

You drive through a rural forested area, come to a small junction without lights. There is a small sign on the roadside that advises the driver to yield for a minute in case of oncoming traffic. The place is as silent as a cemetery, and the driver stops, with his eye on the dashboard clock, and only takes off after a minute.

In Kampala, Nairobi, or most other African cities and countries, that would be greater than a miracle. We not only disregard traffic lights, but even when a policeman is added, he is lucky to go home without being run over.
It seems then something deeper is going on here. And for that reason, I will go back a few years and introduce Nardos Bekele-Thomas.

The Ethiopian-born Bekele-Thomas is currently coordinator of the United Nations System and Resident Representative of the UNDP in Kenya.

I first met her in Kampala at the end of the 1990s where she was working for the UN.

One time I was interviewing her and she dropped something casually that violently jolted my mind. She said, during the early years of strongman Mengistu Haile Mariam’s rule in Ethiopia, the level of literacy rose sharply. By the time of the fall of Mengistu in 1991, the literacy level had fallen off.

I thought she was going to blame the decline on the Ethiopian civil war. She didn’t, and that is what surprised me. She said she was more interested in functional literacy, that dropped dramatically because “people didn’t have an opportunity to use their education, and when that happens people basically become ‘illiterate’ again”.

As anyone who has watched politics closely knows, she was probably right. Educated people can very easily become buffoons.

I took her view and put against that of one of my graduate school professors in Cairo, who once told us in a seminar that the reason traffic in the Egyptian capital was maddeningly unruly, is because the country “didn’t have a technological culture”.

I have written about it before, and there is a part of it that sounds racist. He was an Egyptian himself, so I gave him a pass on it.

So we come back to the carnage on the Kampala-Masaka and other roads on this our fair continent. I think the absence of a technological culture, and the fact that drivers don’t have to use the slightest bit of their education to navigate our roads, contributes something to the traffic tragedies.

If a driver had to punch a button to drive out of a garage, and to drive into a specific parking slot in a parking lot every day, they would begin to form a technological habit.

If to get to a place, they had to read road signs, and observe directional arrows; and if they had to punch a lift floor to go home and to leave for work; if they had to operate a self-service pump to get fuel; and to enter a code that changes ever week to go to work, they would begin to become “technologically rational”.

That is why ATMs, cellphones, and the internet are a blessing. Millions have had to learn to make them work, to memorise passwords, and to have to remember and work with these codes daily.

Technological citizens are emerging. It’s too late for most of the current Uganda population, who still carry some of the old habits. But the little ones, those are the future. Unfortunately, that will happen around 2050.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is editor of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3