Contemporary Kenyans like to compare our society with Japanese, European, South Korean, Chinese and American societies and use them as templates for ideals which we should emulate if we want to deal with corruption, especially on our roads.
While, yes, they are ideal in many respects, we tend to forget one thing: these are tailored to meet specific nuances of those societies, such as the importance of optics in communist China, and pragmatism in Europe and the way Americans have cleverly transformed corruption and called it lobbying. This is a crucial point because in our case, white people forms of formal government were imposed on us less than a hundred and fifty years ago yet they have had large, formal, bureaucratic governments for centuries and in some cases, millennia.
As a result, we find bureaucracy tiresome and like to avoid it. Furthermore, informal methods of problem-solving and administration of justice are what we are used to, such as administering cows or canes as punishment for different crimes. In fact, we still use these methods in many instances, such as when a man exhibits tendencies of extreme truancy.
These 'informal' methods of administration of justice and an inefficient judicial bureaucracy have combined with our love for shortcuts and mischief to heavily influence the motor vehicle bribery industry which includes institutional and commercial and personal drivers and matatu drivers and police who are keen on avoiding the courts and eating, respectively.
Kenyans who are sensitive to the blight of this form of corruption lament a lot about it but when they are caught in the web of our justice system, they appreciate its ability to save their time and money.
At this stage, I would like to note that the Judiciary set up mobile courts along major roads such as the Nairobi-Nakuru highway but we know that method cannot work countrywide 24/7/365 due to cost and (obvious) bureaucratic concerns but it is an important piece of what I am going to suggest next.
In Rwanda, police officers have the power to impose fines on the spot which you pay and are given a receipt for. This method will also not work in Kenya because our officers are a hungry bunch, plus someone will probably be given the tender to create a payment gateway for instant fines which will then be hijacked to make some people fat.
Traffic cameras everywhere with number-plate recognition like in the West are too expensive to implement and are liable to be vandalised by hungry Kenyans somewhere.
What I propose is a hybrid system which recognises our desire for informal justice as a time-saving measure and the hunger of our police officers, and the need for order and safety on our roads and rolls them into one:
First, we need to edit our laws to recognise instant fines, set up fines, rates and punishments and a mechanism for auditing and tracking fine payments countrywide.
Second, we can set up a fine imposition and payment system which can integrate with the Judiciary's enterprise resource planning software to provide bureaucracy-by-software implemented through a mobile application which takes in data including pictures, videos, signatures and textual reports to record incidents. A drop-down menu in this case can be used by the police officer(s) in question to select the specific type of infraction which then autogenerates a receipt sent to the driver's email address derived from TIMS and displays a code and fine for the infraction.
Third and most importantly, a commission for our cops. This is the key to making this all work. Traffic police can be allocated routes or stops which they then select in the system. Their MPESA or bank payment details are also captured in the said systems. Anytime they arrest a person with an infraction, they take photos and videos, perform other bureaucratic tasks, administer the fines and get an instant commission once the driver pays the fine. This will incentivise them to enforce the law thoroughly and with zeal because now their meals are assured. Second, since payments of fines are painful, a low, flat rate can be imposed such as KSh. 5,000 for every infraction except those which lead to immediate loss of life or reasonably threaten loss of life. The immediate effect of this is motorists will do their best to keep the law because, even if you bribe a set of officers, you cannot bribe them all.
You can make the officers' commissions tax-free for their pain and suffering in the heat, cold and rain but only if the money is used on local businesses.
For traffic police officers who have matatus on the road, the officers can choose to forfeit their commissions or get 20x higher fines if their vehicles are reported to cause infractions on the road.
Traffic laws we can choose to drop or institute payments for exemptions include yellow line and noise requirements.
Now, a system which traffic police get a chance to eat better than their peers incentivises institutional chaos seen in incidents such as extreme corruption and poor performance by other police officers but can be reduced by enacting one-year-max requirements for rotating into and out of the traffic department, plus over time, due to good behaviour by Kenyan drivers and vehicle owners (motorbikes included), fewer people will be caught messing around in traffic, making the traffic department less and less lucrative as a result.