NTSA cannot regulate road safety by passing the buck: Kenya needs a clear separation of policy, regulation and enforcement
The Mt Kenya Times By Mr. Fredrick Kipchumba Chelimo – PWD
Email; fkipchelimo@yahoo.com
“The true measure of any road-safety system is not how eloquently it explains a crash, but how effectively it prevents the next one.”
Kenyans must rise against this murderous trend. There is something profoundly unsettling about the way Kenya has learned to live with road deaths. A crash happens. Families receive the devastating news that a loved one will never come home. Communities gather around coffins. Leaders send condolences. Government agencies issue statements promising investigations. Then, as the public grief slowly recedes, the machinery of the country resumes its familiar rhythm, until another crash tears another family apart.
Somewhere between the first warning and the final funeral, responsibility becomes blurred. One institution points to another. An agency explains the limits of its mandate. Officials invoke jurisdiction, procedure or enforcement. Yet the dead do not distinguish between government departments. They were travelling on Kenyan roads, within a transport system ultimately maintained and regulated in the name of public safety.
This is why the continuing debate around the National Transport and Safety Authority should not be reduced to an argument about one accident, one official statement or one institution. It is a much larger national question about whether Kenya has constructed a road-safety architecture in which responsibility is sufficiently clear to prevent death rather than merely explain it afterwards.
The numbers are difficult to absorb precisely because behind every statistic is an unfinished human story. Kenya recorded 5,009 road fatalities in 2025, up from 4,748 in 2024, while reported road accidents rose from 11,165 to 11,638 over the same period. Earlier figures had already revealed the scale of the crisis, with thousands losing their lives within a single reporting period. Pedestrians, motorcyclists, passengers and other vulnerable road users continue to carry a disproportionate share of the danger.
These are not numbers on a government spreadsheet. They are fathers who did not return home, mothers whose children are now growing up without them, young people whose futures disappeared on a stretch of tarmac, workers whose families depended on their daily earnings and passengers who entered vehicles believing that the state had done enough to ensure their safety. That is what makes the mandate of NTSA so important.
The authority was established to regulate and coordinate significant aspects of road transport and safety. Its responsibilities encompass vehicle inspection and certification, licensing, regulation of public service vehicles, road-safety strategies, research, safety education and other regulatory functions. At the same time, the National Police Service remains central to traffic-law enforcement.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with dividing these functions. Modern government depends upon institutions possessing specialised responsibilities. The problem begins when the boundaries between those responsibilities become sufficiently indistinct to allow accountability to evaporate.
When a regulator identifies an unsafe vehicle, who ensures that it is actually removed from the road? When a dangerous operator repeatedly violates the rules, which institution has the final responsibility for stopping that operator? When police officers encounter a vehicle whose regulatory status is questionable, do they have timely access to the information necessary to act? When a road is officially recognised as a black spot, who is responsible for ensuring that the warning produces physical or operational intervention before another family pays the ultimate price? These are not academic questions. They are questions of life and death.
The tragedy at Salama on October 3, in which at least 17 people died in a multiple-vehicle crash along the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, brings the issue into painful focus. NTSA moved to investigate the circumstances and described the area as a known black spot. That response is necessary. But the designation of a location as a known black spot should also provoke an uncomfortable national question: if the danger was already known, what was done before the latest deaths? A black spot should be a call to action, not a geographical obituary.
Kenya does not lack laws. It does not lack regulations. It does not lack agencies. It does not lack committees, strategies, policies or official speeches about road safety. The country has repeatedly demonstrated an impressive ability to produce administrative frameworks. What remains less convincing is the ability to translate those frameworks into sustained prevention.
The Ministry of Roads and Transport has continued to develop regulations dealing with matters including vehicle inspection, school transport, drink-driving and commercial service vehicles. Such measures may be important. But another regulation, by itself, cannot make a dangerous road safe, a reckless driver responsible or an unroadworthy vehicle disappear. The harder question is what happens after the regulation has been written.
A mature transport-safety system should make responsibility visible. The Ministry should provide clear policy direction. The regulator should have defined and enforceable regulatory authority. The police should possess an equally clear enforcement mandate. Road agencies should be responsible for infrastructure interventions within their respective jurisdictions. Investigators should identify not only immediate causes but systemic failures. Parliament should scrutinise whether recommendations are actually implemented. Most importantly, there must be no institutional hiding place between these functions.
The danger of measuring road safety through administrative activity is that government can appear busy while the roads remain dangerous. The number of licences issued, vehicles registered, inspection certificates processed and enforcement operations conducted may make impressive entries in annual reports. But they are not the ultimate measure of safety. The real questions are much more uncomfortable.
How many lives were saved? How many unsafe vehicles were prevented from operating? How many repeat offenders were removed from the road? How many known black spots were corrected? How many recommendations arising from previous crashes were implemented? And, most importantly, are road deaths actually declining because of the interventions undertaken? Those should become the language of accountability.
Parliament’s previous consideration of reforms to the NTSA framework suggests that the institutional question is already on the national agenda. The opportunity should now be used to undertake a comprehensive review of the entire road-safety chain rather than repeatedly responding to individual tragedies in isolation.
Kenya needs a publicly understandable responsibility matrix showing who makes policy, who develops regulations, who licenses, who inspects, who enforces, who prosecutes, who investigates crashes and who is responsible for ensuring corrective measures are implemented. The public should not have to become constitutional lawyers and administrative experts simply to discover who was responsible after their relative has been killed on the road.
There is also a deeper moral question here. Government authority exists ultimately to protect the public interest. Where an institution possesses the power to licence, inspect, regulate and certify, that power must be accompanied by corresponding responsibility. Where another institution possesses enforcement powers, those powers must be supported by clear information, resources and direction. And where responsibilities intersect, there must be mechanisms that ensure cooperation rather than bureaucratic retreat.
Kenyans do not travel on NTSA roads, police roads or Ministry roads. They travel on Kenyan roads. When they die, they do not die according to institutional jurisdictions. Their families experience one loss, not a collection of administrative responsibilities. That is why the culture of passing the buck must end.
The country does not need another cycle in which tragedy produces outrage, outrage produces promises, promises produce committees and committees eventually produce reports that gather dust until another tragedy forces the same conversation. Kenya needs prevention. It needs clarity. It needs measurable accountability. And it needs institutions prepared to accept that regulatory authority is inseparable from public responsibility.
The Salama tragedy should therefore become more than another investigation. It should be an opportunity to ask whether the architecture Kenya has built around road safety is actually capable of delivering the safety its name promises. Because ultimately, the legitimacy of a road-safety authority cannot be measured by the number of licences it issues, vehicles it inspects or statements it releases after disaster. It must be measured by the number of people who leave home in the morning and return safely at night.
“A government that can explain why people died after the crash has happened has fulfilled only the smallest part of its duty; the greater duty is to build a system in which fewer families ever have to receive that terrible call.”
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