My son Daniel is 23.

On Friday, he bought his first car.

Nothing extravagant. A used Toyota.

But you should have seen him.

He washed it twice before sunset.

Photographed it from every possible angle.

Then photographed himself leaning against it as though Toyota had appointed him brand ambassador for East Africa.

I was proud of him.

At 23, your first car is not just transport.

It is freedom.

On Sunday, Daniel offered to drive me into town.

We had barely left home when his phone beeped.

He glanced at it.

Another beep.

Another glance.

Then we stopped in traffic.

Daniel picked up the phone and started typing.

“Put it down.”

“Dad, we aren’t moving.”

The traffic moved.

Daniel didn’t.

The driver behind us hooted.

Daniel accelerated while still looking at the phone.

“Daniel.”

“Dad, relax.”

Those two words nearly made me swallow my spectacles.

“Everybody does it.”

I said nothing.

At the next stop, I asked him to pull over.

“Why?”

“Just pull over.”

He did.

I held out my hand.

“Keys.”

He laughed.

I didn’t.

“Dad, seriously?”

“Keys.”

He handed them over.

We exchanged seats.

The entire journey home, Daniel was furious.

“You don’t trust me.”

I said nothing.

“You still treat me like a child.”

I kept driving.

Then he said:

“I told you. Everybody checks their phone while driving.”

That evening, I mentioned the argument to Uncle Rwamiti.

He listened quietly.

Then he asked:

“If everybody is checking their phone, Daniel, who exactly is watching the road?”

Daniel laughed.

Then stopped laughing.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Perhaps that is the strange thing about road safety.

We keep treating it as a problem of people who don’t know.

Don’t drink and drive.

Don’t speed.

Wear your seat belt.

Don’t use your phone.

Daniel knows all these things.

So do his friends.

So do I.

Maybe our biggest road-safety problem is not always ignorance.

Perhaps it is something more difficult:

How do we turn what people already know into what they actually do when nobody is watching?

Uncle Rwamiti

Making sense of change through ethical storytelling.