Tears are no longer enough.

They may have died while on a mission for Christ in another country, but that does not make the pain of losing the mothers who died in Tanzania any less painful. It is an indictment of the system that we all inherited from the colonial government that we are unable to maintain safety on any of East Africa's roads. Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania stand accused of failing to use self-rule and independence to improve the lot of the African. Instead the priorities of the leaders of the three nations, bar possible Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, to use uhuru as the fig leaf for their avaricious power grabs. The peoples of the East African community have paid for the sins of their leaders: poorly designed and constructed roads; corrupt road and traffic departments; carnage on the highways.

In the few weeks I have spent in Sydney, I have found myself being extra careful when crossing the road. It is easier to be careful here: the roads are well designed and built and there is ample space for pedestrians. Even in the rain, it is very easy to get from place to place: no sections of the pavement are muddy or filled with water. It is a pleasure being a pedestrian in this town. It is remarkable that there are hardly any traffic police on the streets and everyone obeys the rules. You only cross roads at designated sites and only when the traffic lights are in your favour. Drivers obey the traffic rules; speeding is unheard of. I am yet to witness a road traffic accident!

Impunity is a hackneyed word in East Africa yet it captures perfectly the distance we have to cover before we can assure the peoples of East Africa that their governments will keep their interests in mind at all times. When it comes to the enforcement of the rules, it should not be that men of power and means are given a pass while the hoi polloi get the book thrown at them every time they step a little out of line. Politics should not be the reason why innocent mothers are mowed down in roads that barely qualify as such. Documents should mean what they say; if a man holds a commercial driving license, it must mean that he is qualified to drive commercial vehicles of a particular description and that his driving record is unimpeachable.

Driving in Kenya reveals in stark detail the failures of governance that we have suffered for nigh on forty years. Drivers take their licenses as a license to commit some of the most flagrant violations of the Traffic Code. Traffic police take their uniforms for a license to extort and steal from the public. The courts are only to happy to shuffle the litigants as cards on a deck without laying out for all to read the facts so far outlined. Sunny Bindra is right: if we cannot keep public places, especially public toilets, clean, we will never be able to govern ourselves effectively, brand-new constitutions notwithstanding.