The FIA President, Jean Todt implored the country to work on mechanism to end road carnage. The President who is also the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Road Safety, stressed the need for individuals to work towards ending road carnage that has claimed millions of lives.
“Accidents kill a lot of people especially in Africa where about 25,000 in every 100,000 people die every year because of road accidents. We need to take care of that,” said Todt.
In Kenya, we lose over 3000 lives every year on our roads, according to NTSA report released on 11th November, 2020 from January to October of the same year, road crash deaths increased by 5.8%. In 2020 by the time of publishing this magazine, 3114 persons had died compared to 2942 in the same period last year. This comes even with Covid 19 and the lockdowns. The Road accident fatalities exceeded the Covid 19 deaths in the same period.
During the same period, motorcycle accident fatalities increased by 48%. At the time, 884 motorcyclist died compared to 597 in the year 2019. These fatalities are attributed to drunk driving, failure to wear helmets among others.
These victims, are bread winners, children, mothers and fathers. They are honorable tax payers, who wake up every day to work hard to build our economy.
In order to reduce the road traffic accident, AA Kenya is responding to the Second decade of action call of ensuring quality training for the riders across the country. The association has begun country wide training of motorcycle riders (boda boda) on Road safety. This year, despite the pandemic, the Association has trained over 1000 motorcycle riders.