NAIROBI LETTER:The less than thorough Kenyan driving test may explain the high level of fatal traffic incidents
‘ARE YOU free?” I asked my regular taxi driver, popping over to the canteen where he waits in a battered old Corolla for business most nights.
“Sure,” he said, before picking up a beer bottle from the door pocket, knocking it down his throat and chucking it over his shoulder, where it landed on the back seat with a loud “clink”. There was more than one back there.
I made my excuses, rang another driver, and resolved finally to get myself a driving licence. And as with a lot of things in Kenya, it started with talk of money.
“Will I have to pay a bribe?” I ask the driving instructor half jokingly, watching out for the heart-stopping sight of Nairobi’s minibuses scooting past, driven so fast they look like they are in take-off mode. “At the driving test?”
“You mean they didn’t tell you in the office?!” he asks, aghast, one hand on my wheel, another chewing through a lump of khat.
“Of course you will,” he says, his eyes rolling with drug-induced euphoria. “These are Kenyan police officers!”
I’m sceptical, however.
After 12 one-hour "how-to" lessons on dodging hand-pulled carts and making out what my drug-fuelled instructor really means to say, this is the first I've heard of handing over a kitu kidogo– Swahili for "something small", which means a bribe.
So when he says it will be 1,500 Kenyan shillings (€11), three times the daily wage in Kenya’s capital, and that I will have to give it to him, I know I’m being had.
“Look,” I say. “If they want one, they can ask me themselves.”
In the end, myself and 80 other would-be drivers get a 25-minute lecture under the heading “Don’t even bother trying to bribe us” from the police commandant about to administer our driving tests on a sunny summer’s morning in Nairobi.
At least this is what I am led to understand by the only other foreigner queuing up at 9am, a theology lecturer from Co Dublin who got there minutes before me. The commandant then launches into a big tirade, telling us, “if you gave your instructor money, ask for it back”.
Most of the day is spent queuing. Queuing to fill in forms. Queuing to hand in forms. Queuing to get a bottle of Coke as I wait to get in the queue with everyone else to get quizzed on my knowledge of driving on Kenyan roads.
“This is Africa,” people shrug, a familiar air of resignation holding long lines of test subjects together. “Always queuing.”
It’s 12.30 before I finally step out of the mid-summer sun to carry out the theory test.
Some of the questions are uniquely African. “What should you bring in your car if going on safari?” Others are obvious. “What is a caravan?”
A good deal are plain unusual. “How many eyes does a driver have?” Answer: three. His own and the mirrors.
But it certainly doesn’t seem thorough, and might go to explaining why Kenya has one of the highest rates of road accidents in the world, with 510 people involved in fatal accidents for every 100,000 vehicles on the road. In South Africa the rate is 260, in the UK, 20.
A police officer points at a roundabout and asks me to drive a miniature car around in a model town, designed to test my ability to switch lanes on roundabouts. “Okay, go sit under the tree and wait for your practical,” he says.
“That’s the hard part done,” a passing Kenyan whispers to me.
I don’t believe him. At least not until I cram into the back of a saloon car with two others, with another youngster barely out of his teens in the front. Beside him is a police officer.
“Are you Ethiopian?” he asks the boy, now moments away from getting his driving licence. “Yes,” he says, his voice twitching as he is asked to switch the engine on and put the car into first gear.
“What are you doing in Kenya? Selling AK47s? RPGs?”His face freezes. “Student. I’m a student.”
On command he pulls the hand brake, and stops before a speed bump.
“Okay. Next!” says the officer. It all seems a bit too easy. That is until the next test subject drives the car up on top of a kerb.
“Fail!” shouts the officer. “Get out! Next!” I’m up.
I get out of the back and clamber into the driver’s seat, giving the gear stick a shake to make sure it is in neutral.
“You can start,” says the officer. I put it into first, slow down at a speed bump, and when asked, slip the car into second gear. Then, I put my left foot on the brake.
“No, no,” says the officer. “You’re supposed to use your right foot. But I think the manual might be confusing you, no? In your country you will be using an automatic, right?”
“Err, umm, yes. Yes. Automatics.” Forty-three years as a British colony, but every foreigner is still seen as an American. “Okay, next!” says the officer.
“That’s it?” “Yes.”
I’ve passed, even if the test is more one of patience than aptitude. I give a friend at home a call and tell him the good news.
“Can you actually drive?” he asks. “Not quite sure,” I say. “But I think it’s best if I do another one at home.”