National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) Director General Nashon Kondiwa has defended the authority’s crackdown on the misuse of Kenya Dealer (KD) plates.
Speaking in an interview on Monday, June 15, he insisted that the move is aimed at improving vehicle traceability and addressing security concerns.
Kondiwa noted that the problem was not with licensed dealers themselves but with the misuse and trading of dealer plates.
"The issue is not the dealers. The issue is that these dealers’ plates were being traded on, and therefore, you could not even trace who had used these plates or not," he said.
Kondiwa explained that KD plates are used on vehicles that have not yet been registered and therefore cannot serve as a reliable means of identifying a specific vehicle.
Read More
"Remember, they are used on vehicles that are not registered. KD plates are not unique. The car that has the KD plate cannot be used to identify the car," he added.
According to Kondiwa, the dealers are seeking greater flexibility in the use of the plates, but NTSA believes such a move would create significant security risks.
"What these dealers are asking is that we should open it so that any vehicle can use any KD plate and move, and that is the problem because if we had a security issue, we could not trace who used the plate," he noted.
At the same time, Kondiwa revealed that when he took office, the authority was facing a substantial backlog of unprinted number plates, despite payments already having been made by thousands of Kenyans.
He acknowledged that the authority is currently experiencing delays due to cash flow challenges but said progress has been made in reducing the backlog.
"Since I became DG, I have tried to clean up the backlog of plates, which I found to be over 30,000 plates that Kenyans have paid for but have never been printed.
"As we speak, I have 5000 in three months, and this has impacted the cash flows and delays that we are currently experiencing, though we will sort it out within the next 3 days," he further said.
During the same interview, Kondiwa revealed that 2,150 lives have been lost in road accidents since the beginning of the year.
He said the majority of people killed in road crashes are pedestrians.
"We have 2,150 people who died on the roads this year, which is an increase of around 11 percent from last year, and of these, around 836 are pedestrians. They form the majority, followed by motorcyclists; we have 188 drivers who have died on the road," he stated.
Kondiwa warned that the country risks losing up to 10 percent of the GDP by 2030 if no intervention is done to curb the road accidents.
"We have done some projections and realized that if we don’t have a serious intervention on these numbers, we are likely to lose up to 10% of the GDP by 2030," he added.
At the same time, Kondiwa announced that drivers will be re required to go refresher training from July.
The NTSA boss explained that the move is aimed at enhancing road safety by ensuring drivers who are regularly on the road get additional driving skills.
"From July, we want to train drivers afresh. In every profession, there is what we call professional development; people go for refresher courses.
"We want to really implement this for drivers who are continuously on the road. So that people don't just go to driving school and think they will remember everything forever," he stated.
-1781591748.jpg)
