Road Safety Association faults govt for ignoring warnings on accidents
By Kiprono Keileb, August 12, 2025Kenya’s rising wave of deadly road accidents is not a sudden tragedy but a disaster long foreseen and ignored. That’s according to David Njoroge, Chairperson of the Kenya Road Safety Association, who says the government was warned two years ago that the current crisis was coming, yet failed to act.
“Our roads are not safe. Whatever is happening, the government is aware because, as road safety experts, we had told them that in two years, these road accidents would be here and now they have started happening,” Njoroge said this during a morning radio talk show on a local radio station on Tuesday, August 12, 2025.
He said the crisis is rooted in law enforcement failures and a dangerous culture of shortcuts that has flooded Kenyan roads with untrained drivers and uninspected vehicles.
According to Njoroge, acquiring a driving licence in Kenya no longer requires skill or training, just money.
“You can have a licence with Ksh6,000. So we have many drivers on our roads who don’t know how to drive,” he noted. This, he says, has shifted accident trends. Unlike in the past when matatus were blamed for most crashes, today the culprits are more often personal cars and lorries.
The situation has been further aggravated by the breakdown of vehicle inspection protocols. Njoroge revealed that lorries, which should undergo rigorous checks, are often cleared without even leaving their parking yards.
“Lorries currently don’t go for inspection. They pay Ksh6000, and the lorry is ‘inspected’ by money while at home,” he said, stating that some inspection officials are turning road safety into a business rather than a life-saving duty.
The result, he says, is a staggering backlog of unsafe vehicles on Kenyan roads.
“There are over 1.2M vehicles that have not been inspected,” Njoroge stated, warning that each uninspected car or truck represents a potential accident waiting to happen.
He stressed that road safety is not about empty speeches or seasonal crackdowns, but about laws being enforced consistently and all actors from licensing officials to traffic police playing their roles without compromise.
His remarks come as Kenya faces a spate of fatal road crashes, with recent accidents claiming dozens of lives in a matter of weeks. Road safety advocates have repeatedly pointed to corruption, lax enforcement, and outdated infrastructure as major contributors to the carnage.
Njoroge is calling for an immediate overhaul of the country’s licensing and inspection systems, including strict penalties for officials and drivers who flout the rules. “Actors must stop doing business with people’s lives,” he said, warning that without urgent reforms, the death toll will keep climbing.
For now, he says, Kenyans are paying the price for years of negligence.
“We told them this would happen, and now it is happening,” he said, a grim reminder that road safety failures are rarely accidents they are the predictable outcome of ignoring expert advice.