I got caught up in one of those crazy Nairobi traffic jams yesterday evening. The ones that you hear others talking about, sympathize and walk away not really comprehending what they are on about. For crying out loud, this should not have happened on a public holiday.....on Monday 12th December 2011 in the evening but it did!
It was on the new Thika Road at about 6.15 pm on our way home accompanied by my daughter. Knowing that it was a public holiday and certain that Kenyans were either enroute home from wherever, or going to wherever I thought it would be a good idea to use this road which means that at moderate speed we would be home in 10 minutes flat!! After all the road is all of 6 lanes wide on the out bound traffic from the city and the only place we would possibly encounter a minor traffic jam was just after the Pangani roundabout, or what is left of it.
The problem with the Thika Road approach at the Pangani roundabout area is that you are blind till you crest the brow of the hill and then you are inside madness or heaven depending on what side of the road the local road hogs woke up on because, like it or not, that is the point of no return on this road.
Cresting the point of no return revealed an ugly, depressing picture of vehicular traffic standing still, 8 lanes across from the extreme left, across the road divide and through to the other inside left lane. Looking up towards the Muthaiga roundabout area across the valley was chock-a-block with cars, trucks, buses and off course the ubiquitous matatu all competing for crawling space one painful inch by painful inch at a time. The funny thing was that the outbound vehicles across the valley were on what I thought was the diversion for inbound traffic from Thika into the city and there was no traffic flowing in the opposite direction towards the city!!
Having flown though the point of no return and with few options available other than keeping left on the side road to Mobil Plaza then on to Limuru Road, Runda and home or go with the flow and join the crush of cars on the wrong side of the road.......decisions, decisions and in that moment of indecision I was swallowed up in a crush of moving vehicles and deposited on the side of the road where inbound traffic was required to inch rightfully and painfully against a crush of mental basket case drivers gung ho on getting home one way or the other!!
To cut a long story short, it was an hour and a half of agonizing vehicular acrobatics, where no one yielded or gave an inch, where every inch was hard fought for with other equally determined drivers in the various vehicles. It was also the theater of the absurd where matatu touts were the self appointed traffic marshalls, determined to outdo the opposing matatus from the oncoming traffic so as to see their respective matatus crawl along a few more feet even at the risk of blocking all other traffic. One tout even pointed out a gap that should be left open to oncoming vehicles for us to fill so as to give his driver the opportunity to advance 15 feet more.
At one point a decidedly foolhardy, possibly suicidal matatu driver performed a stunt I though extremely risky driving over an iron sheet of some type over a deep chasm put there by the road crew with the iron sheet protesting and groaning as if under siege by the sheer weight of the matatu which thankfully managed to overcome the obstacle with the usual bravado of these matatu drivers and touts, perhaps a story to regale his pals later over a bottle of beer!!
The sheer stupidity of the traffic jam was as a result of one of Kenya's idiotic exports to the literary world overlapping. Overlapping is the trick whereby one extremely bright driver, usually of the matatu tribe of drivers decides that he is in more of a hurry than anyone else, brakes away from the following pack of drivers and forms his own lane where free from the shackles of a legitimate traffic jam streaks out in front of the rest of the traffic but is miraculously able to rejoin the queue of frustrated drivers 20 cars ahead against the face of oncoming traffic. However, the 20 following drivers too timid to be chairmen of such foolish behavior now find it perfectly acceptable to play 'follow the leader' but now find it impossible to get back into their own queues because the drivers in their correct lane will hear none of it so as they sit wallowing in a pool of their own stupidity they now cause other equally desperate and clueless drivers behind them to resort to similar tricks thereby slowing the pace of oncoming traffic by reducing the gap available to them until eventually the king of idiots seeing the last space available to him against the face of oncoming traffic rushes in to fill it and inevitably the worst happens, a gridlock of gargantuan proportions develops with the same scenario being replicated on the other side of the traffic jam by the relatives, brothers and sisters of the morons who started the whole 'overlapping' business on this side of the traffic jam. Meanwhile the initial perpetrator is long gone probably unaware of his contribution to the death of civilized behavior on our Kenya roads!!
If we would only stick to our side of the road all of us would get to our destinations in a better frame of mind!!
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