Those ministers and bureaucrats who denied famine should be sacked

The government has rightly taken plenty of flack for being slow in response to the threat of famine.

Even when it became apparent that Kenyans faced dire threat of death by starvation, Cabinet ministers from their well-appointed offices preferred to bury their heads in the sand.

It was as if the official Kenya Government policy was to wait until people started dying. Or maybe it was all a matter of “let them eat cake”.

If the problem was that maize-flour had become more expensive than wheat-flour, the hoi polloi could surely adjust their diets to accommodate chapatti for the main meal and black forest for dessert instead of ugali all round.

In any case, it was only the lazy characters out in some God-forsaken outpost who were facing starvation. Why couldn’t they do some work and earn enough to buy their own food just like other hard-working Kenyans?

It was only when the clamour assumed international dimensions that everybody started running around. Actually a whole slate of senior officers in dereliction of duty should be sacked, starting with the irresponsible ministers and permanent secretaries, and down to officers in the Provincial Administration and ministries of Agriculture and Special Projects who sat on their haunches as things got from bad to worse.

Those ministers who were busy running around the country trumpeting their presidential campaigns or trying to curry the favour of their favourite candidate-cum-ethnic chieftain should be held personally liable if anyone in Kenya dies of hunger. The operative word here is if.

Special venom was reserved last week for Government spokesman Alfred Mutua. Never the most tactful of spin-doctors, Dr Mutua provoked widespread outrage when he appeared to assert at his weekly gabfest that there was plenty of food available and no one had died of hunger.

Actually to be fair to Dr Mutua, he had never quite said that, but by the time he came out with desperate clarifications and threats to sue, it was a bit too late, and it would be a tall order trying to sue the entire World Wide Web.

What the good Dr Mutua actually had said was that the government had enough food in its stores, and was not “officially aware” that anyone had died of hunger.

In fact he appealed to the media, aid agencies, churches, health workers and the public to report if anyone died of hunger — verified cases, not old age, disease or other causes.

Now, Dr Mutua put things in his own imitable style, and one sometimes needs to pause a little to let the brain process what the ears have heard.

He talked about people dying of “old age and other diseases”. He asked for information from anyone who has a “confirmed death of anyone who has died…”.

Anyway, what provoked the resultant din was that the government spokesman appeared to be dismissing flippantly a very dire situation. The noise obscured the simple fact that Dr Mutua was simply stating the obvious.

The stories we hear in the newsrooms might suggest large-scale deaths by starvation, especially in the far-flung reaches of the North-Eastern Province and the northern Rift Valley, particularly Turkana. But so far, they have not checked out, and remain claims rather than verified cases.

As Dr Mutua was speaking, media houses had sent out teams to cover the most affected areas, and many of them were hard-pressed to provide photographic evidence of emaciated, skeletal figures with distended bellies that typify famine.

So they resorted to using pictures of Somali refugees trekking into Kenya to escape starvation in their own country. Now, I do not hold brief for Dr Mutua or his employer. I am not minimising the threat of famine; indeed it looms large, and hence the need for all Kenyans to support the public fund-raising drive.

And herein lies the import of Dr Mutua’s statement, which was lost in the noise: The public is welcome to raise funds to feed the hungry, but the government has all the food that is required, so the money raised should go towards distribution and logistics and not buying bales of unga in supermarkets.

mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com