Brrrr! It looks like we are in for a very wet rainy season. It's got Addisites throwing about that tired cliché “ Addis Ababa should have been farmland” – still in use today thanks to this concrete rainforest of a city. FYI – Addis Ababa is the rainiest African capital after Bujumbura and Kigali and the wettest north of the equator, London notwithstanding.

Addis Ababa – lovable chaos as it is, hardly claims to be a planned city. It resembles more a huge explosion of buildings, structures and obstacles. This clutter of possibly untamable urban sprawl is interconnected to varying levels of coverage by a road system that seems to have been designed for a city in the Gobi Desert , where it rains once in say, five years. If that Addis Ababa street, be it paved or gravel, leading to your house or place of work was built the way it should have been, then you wouldn't have had that Italian suit and shoes ruined when some insensitive taxi gave you a good old mudbath! If you were the culprit, that couple going to a wedding wouldn't have said those things they said about your dear mom. Addis winter is a story of puddles, which brings us more directly to this week's Brakes, Please! Driving tips.

Traffic records show that a disproportionate percentage of all accidents occur during the 60 odd days of the Ethiopian rainy season. This is mainly because drivers fail to prepare their vehicles for wet surface driving. Vehicle brakes, tires and the steering system must be kept at acceptable and legal operating efficiency throughout the year and particularly during the rainy season. It is estimated that a vehicle's effective braking distance doubles when trying to stop on a wet surface even with good braking equipment.

Most vehicles in Addis Ababa are fitted with brake components that do not meet manufacturers standards. This is due to the high prices of genuine spare parts and the helpless dependence on cheap but barely functional counterfeit spares made by obscure companies in Asia and the Middle East .

There is also the matter of vehicle age. Apart from the obviously eco-unfriendly 1960 – 1980's technology, most of the cars in Ethiopia are so obsolete that the original manufacture's is either defunct or has long abandoned producing parts for that venerable model. Short of the impractical measure of banishing old clunkers from the streets, what can be done to improve vehicles vital safety equipment? Also, what can drivers of even relatively modern cars (in Ethiopia a ‘new' or ‘contemporary' car is anything made as of 1995!) do to ensure safer driving in winter? We'll be back with some informed answers next week.

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