Seventeen Catholic pilgrims are dead. The road that killed them has a body count that keeps growing. And the government has known about it for years.
The stretch of the Nairobi-Mombasa Highway around Mlima Kiu, near a town ironically named Salama — Kiswahili for “safety” — has become one of Kenya’s most reliably deadly corridors. Saturday’s crash did not come out of nowhere. It came out of a system that has failed ordinary Kenyans again and again, and continues to do so with stunning indifference.
Here is what you need to understand about why this road keeps killing people.
Residents living in the shadow of this black spot are not asking for the impossible. They want the highway expanded into a dual carriageway. That is it. A straightforward infrastructure fix that traffic engineers, residents and drivers all agree would save lives. The fact that it has not happened — while the death toll climbs — is not a logistical failure. It is a political choice.
Seventeen pilgrims set out on a journey of faith and never came home. Kilonzo lost his passenger and his livelihood in one moment. A family buries their patriarch two weeks before another family buries seventeen of their own, on the same stretch of road. Kenya deserves better than this. Demand it.
