It was midday. I was among a group of pedestrians waiting to cross Uhuru Highway. However, the cop controlling the traffic appeared to be in a trance. For a long time he stood on the same spot, one hand holding his phone to his ear (What happened to walkie-talkies, and who do traffic policemen talk to all the time?) waved motorists coming from Mombasa Road through.
We, pedestrians, would look at him hopefully, then look at the oncoming traffic with indignant resignation.
This was going to be a long wait. Some pedestrians got tired of watching the one-scene movie that was the cop. Many of them fished out their phones and got busy. I suppose they were updating their social media pages about how long they had been waiting to cross the road. Others got discussing traffic (What a mundane topic? I always think). Some wanted to know if the President had returned from Mombasa. Others, like me, started plotting a story line.
Our activities were interrupted by screeching car tyres. The vehicles had come to a sudden stop and were all in jumbled lines. Several drivers hooted angrily. The cop came out of his trance and went to check what had happened; one would think he had seen everything.
It turned out that while the rest of us were engrossed in our smart phones and other activities, some young man had run across the road, forgetting that the vehicles were moving at no less than 40kph.
Of course that had caught the drivers off guard, thus the screeching. Now he was waving at us, cowards, from the other side of the road. The cop pointed at him angrily but he simply waved back and swaggered away.
The rest of us took advantage of the confusion and scampered across the road. Some were “shocked” at the young man’s behaviour. Others, like me, were just happy to be moving. I bet everyone knew it was thanks to the “crazy” young man that we were
now moving. If he had not taken the risk, we would still have been waiting to cross the road, tapping the footpaths angrily with our feet, or tapping angrily on our mobile phones, or mentally writing down stories angrily.
But life is like that. Sometimes there are barriers between us and our goals. When the barrier looks massive and scary, like traffic flow, our instinct is to wait for the barrier to, hopefully, go away on its own. Sometimes it is a problem that starts small but can
grow enormously if not nipped in the bud.
It was obvious the traffic cop had somehow lost track of time. That was the only plausible explanation since the President was still in Mombasa and there were no visiting dignitaries, to the best of my knowledge. While we should always trust that the cop
knows what he is doing, we should not forget that he, too, is human, so he can forget to stop waving vehicles through.
The young man who took a risk and crossed the road came close to being hit by several cars, but he was not.
Sometimes, the dangers are glaring and common sense tells us not to go bare knuckle against them, but not facing those dangers will have ripple effects; like getting late. All it takes is one courageous person to change things, to risk his or her own life for his or her sake, as well as for the sake of all the others.
We could have all just stood there and waited for the cop to keep waving the vehicles on, but that would have made all of us late. We all knew something was not right with his sense of timing, so why didn’t we complain to him? Are we so used to “taking it”
even when we know something is not right? What is the worst that could have happened if we had approached him? Perhaps all he would he have told us was to mind our own business.
Instead, like typical Kenyans, we chose to complain through social media while the person we were complaining about was standing right in front of us.
