Boda-Boda

It's been a while since my last posting. A fortnight's holiday in England, followed by a frantic week trying to catch up with actions, correspondence, meetings and office minutiae, has taken its toll on blogging, not to mention the colossal amount of time simply spent on getting from A to B - whether from the idyll of our converted barn in Lower Loxhore to the beach at Mortehoe in North Devon - or the hellish gridlock of Nairobi rush hour traffic from Westlands to the Norfolk Hotel.

While sitting in a motionless Mitsubishi taxi in Nairobi last week, a friend texted me from Kampala. In my reply, I bemoaned the fact that motorised boda-bodas (motorcycle taxis), ubiquitous in Kampala, are absent in Nairobi. Doubtless there are excellent health and safety reasons for their absence, but the fact is that motorcycles are undoubtedly the best method for travelling short distances in over-crowded cities with poor and/or outmoded transport infrastructure. Kampala traffic, bad at the best of times, would simply grind to a halt without the boda-boda, and the same could be said of many Asian cities (Ho Chi Min City in Vietnam springs to mind) and other African destinations (Ouagaodougou in Burkina Faso) where two wheels predominate over four.

Boda-bodas are, frequently, a source of mingled amusement and wonder. It isn't unusual to see three passengers plus the driver on a boda-boda, the driver over-revving its puny engine to get up the smallest incline. Kampala ladies, out of modesty, ride side-saddle - at least when they are wearing skirts. They are often used to transport substantial objects - this morning I followed a boda-boda with a single bed frame balanced precariously between the driver and the passenger.

Boda-bodas enjoy a mixed reputation in Kampala: most residents claim to dislike them, yet their numbers increase almost daily. Every now and again the police try to regulate them - most recently through a compulsory helmet-wearing (interestingly this only applied to the driver, not the passenger) programme, or through licencing arrangements, but these initiatives tend to die out after a week or two. Further, boda-boda drivers tend to regard themselves as being above normal traffic laws. The blithe arrogance with which customary traffic rules are broken is attributed to Presidential patronage. A few years ago, President Museveni, impatient at being stuck in Kampala city traffic, and late for at least one appointment, is said to have jumped out of his presidential vehicle, hailed a boda-boda driver, and sped through the traffic. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but it makes a good story and (at least in part) accounts for the high standing the Ugandan President enjoys among the boda-boda fraternity.

As I continued this idle line of thought in my still-motionless Nairobi taxi, I wondered why some cities have adopted the motorcycle and others haven't. They are unsuited to cold countries, for obvious reasons, but why, for example, has the boda-boda become so established in Kampala when it is virtually absent from Dar es Salaam and Khartoum - both cities increasingly blighted by weight of traffic. I suppose it has something to do with regulation, but I can't help agreeing with my friend at AGRA in Nairobi, Joe de Vries, that sheer volume of traffic will make four wheels the old transport paradigm in developing-country cities in the years to come. Two wheels is the future!

As a postscript, our Mitsubishi taxi did eventually make it through the Nairobi traffic, but to use another Kampala expression, even travelling by "Footsubishi" would have been a great deal quicker. Bring on the boda-boda!