Matatu beast feeds on us but mocks us in return

It wasn’t funny or proper, but who in the matatu business knows anything about decency?

The other day, on the Namanga-Kitengela highway, a middle-aged couple travelling to Nairobi waved down a matatu. When it stopped, they asked the boy collecting fares whether the vehicle was heading to the city. He nodded yes. They sat down and paid.
But as soon as the driver got to Kitengela, he veered off the highway, joined a service road, turned around and parked the vehicle to disgorge his passengers. He and the boy didn’t have to utter a word. The message was clear – the vehicle wasn’t going to Nairobi after all.

Egos were bruised, bad words were exchanged, but refunds were made and life continued on its usual knotted path.
Versions of this experience, you’d argue, happen dozens of times every day in every town in the republic, so what? The rascal’s mischievous lie, you’d say, was harmless – no one was hurt or lost any money.

And you’d be right, because matatu crew have been known to display much worse beastly behaviour (a newspaper reported a few years ago that a passenger was thrown over a bridge into the river below somewhere in the North Rift for failing to pay, what, ten shillings?)

But the workaday episode illustrates something revealing about the matatu business. It’s always boogieing on the verge of illegality, if not immersed in it, pushing the envelope on what’s appropriate or acceptable conduct.

There’s another notable element – though many of these vehicles are owned by largely honest adult strivers chasing their version of the wealth dream, the day-to-day affairs of the businesses are run by immature young people who take breathtaking risks.
Many of the young men wear contempt for the law and their passengers on their chests. They supervise themselves and make their own rules as they go along.

And therein lie the risks. A service used by millions of Kenyans is run by young people who have yet to learn how to speak politely to others or don’t understand the legal or cultural limits on what a person can do or say.

They are brash and impulsive, picking up petty quarrels with customers, eager to argue or fight over nothing. Then there are the ear-splitting intrusions from unwanted music, the sudden change of travel routes, the arbitrary revisions of fares.

It’s also obvious that the training of matatu drivers is mediocre. They don’t seem to have mastered basic driving skills. They don’t get it or don’t care, for example, that changing lanes suddenly can be deadly, or that something as simple as signalling to other drivers and pedestrians the intention to turn by using the correct indicators can mean the difference between life and death.

They seem to be ignorant too about how vehicles function. They bring the wheelbarrow attitude to these delicately built machines and abuse them relentlessly, so that as soon as a new specimen hits the road, it’s as good as junk.

But even with all this chaotic unsophistication, some people still tickle us by calling it the “matatu industry”, implying organisation and respectability that don’t really exist.

It’s not an industry – it’s a many-sided racket. The crew jamming 20 people into a tiny Japanese van meant to carry eight nursery school children. The owners sitting somewhere making phone calls to coordinate bribes for cops when legal trouble inevitably comes.

The regulators turning a blind eye.

An interesting statistic comes to mind. There were less than five million vehicles registered in Kenya in 2021. It’s a minuscule number in a country of 50 million people. A good number of these vehicles were matatus.

The Kajiado couple tricked into boarding the wrong vehicle probably own a family jalopy for their weekend trips to the market but still rely on matatus for long-distance travel. Thus the beast we love to hate endures and continues to spit in our face for our patronage.

— The writer is a sub-editor with People Daily