NTSA Announces Driver Refresher Courses Starting Next Month

The National Transport Safety Authority (NTSA) Director General, Nashon Kondiwa, has announced that drivers who are always on the road will be required to undergo mandatory refresher training starting in July.

According to the DG, the retraining programme is meant to ensure drivers do not rely solely on skills acquired during their initial driving school training, which is simply not enough.

Just like doctors, engineers and other professionals attend continuous development courses, NTSA now wants drivers held to the same standard of ongoing learning.

“From July, we want to train drivers afresh. In every profession, there’s what we call ‘professional development ‘… people go for refresher courses, so we want to really implement this for drivers that are continuously on the road. So that people don’t just go to driving school and think they will remember everything forever,” Kondiwa said in an interview with Citizen TV on Monday night.

He added, “And we have seen this work in institutions where driver training has been made mandatory, like every year you have to go for refresher courses.”

The authority has pointed out that Kenya now wants to emulate other countries, such as the European Union nations and Singapore, that already make annual driver retraining mandatory, noting some drivers in those countries have gone five straight years without recording a single accident.

NTSA now wants to extend that same discipline to all drivers who operate on Kenyan roads on a regular basis to reduce road accidents, which have rocked the nation for ages, with this year recording an all-time high in reports.

So far this year, NTSA has recorded 2,150 road fatalities, an 11 per cent rise compared to the same period last year, with pedestrians accounting for the largest share of deaths at 836, according to Kondiwa.

Additionally, drivers killed on the road this year stand at 188, representing 11 per cent of total fatalities, while motorcyclists also continue to feature prominently in the numbers.

Beyond retraining, the authority is also working with the Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA) and the Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA) to implement the International Road Assessment Programme (IRAP), which will rate every road in the country on a zero-to-five-star safety scale for different road users.

Vehicle safety standards are equally under review, with NTSA pushing for tighter engineering requirements to ensure cars on Kenyan roads meet minimum safety thresholds.

Last year alone, 4,400 people died on Kenyan roads, costing the economy an estimated Ksh450 billion in lost GDP, a figure the World Bank puts even higher at around Ksh 800 billion annually.

NTSA has warned that without serious intervention, Kenya risks losing up to 10 per cent of its GDP to road carnage by 2030.