Phone Aside! Driving Demands Full Attention

Almost anywhere you park today requires the payment of a fee even in quite small up-country towns where there are plenty of empty spaces.

The concept of a parking tax is common, almost everywhere in the world. What makes our version different, and especially nerve-wracking, is that there are often no signs of any sort to notify or to explain.

Fortunately, most people know the answers. You should assume the charge is payable almost everywhere. You can pay the person wearing a yellow dustcoat or through your mobile phone. The cost ranges unpredictably from Sh50 to Sh300, whether you park all day or for just a few minutes. The shop you have parked next to will know.

If you dont know that, or cant find a yellow coat, or forget, or think that the place or time you park is exempt (some times and places are), you can be clamped, spend hours finding the process and the person to get unlocked, and have to pay a fine of several thousand shillings!

Officials pursue the clamping and fine outcome with exceptional diligence and sometimes cunning. And as with so many motoring punishments, the fine is not just money. It is a huge penalty in time.

The idea that you must pay to park is not unreasonable, but the lack of on-site information and signage is extraordinary. It would be unthinkable in other places north of the tropic of cancer, and in most places south of it, too.

But as I say, most people get to know the deal, so neither the cost nor the need for guesswork nor the instances of gross injustices for genuine dont know is the prime cause for concern.

Much higher up the worry list is the administrative attitude that this situation represents; the fact that officials (not only but also not least in motoring) grant themselves sweeping authority to punish motorists without a smidgen of countervailing responsibility to explain or advise or inform or account for what they themselves door dont do.

When have you ever heard of a road administrator being punished for failing to do what they should do?

The real problem that turns even something as banal as a parking ticket into a major national issue is that the public apparently think this situation is okay. Everybody moans, but no one takes any proper remedial action, either individually or institutionally.

It is that, not fees or fines, that should make us shudder.

When will it be time to cry enough! How, and by whom, and to whom, should that shout be uttered? Given todays date, how about this for an initial distress call: May Day! May Day!

Its free!