Medical diplomacy force worth exploiting

So Tanzania doctors will not be crossing the border to work in Kenya, after all.

The news that President John Pombe Magufuli has stopped the plan has excited Kenyans. Initially, Kenyans were vexed.

The mainstream media and social media were overwhelmed by hot discourses on the deal. Understandably so. Kenyans believe theirs is a better country and, therefore, to suggest deficiency solvable by neighbours is incongruous, hence the dissonance and disenchantment.

Kenya, no doubt is a regional power. Our gross domestic product is bigger than Tanzania’s. Our military spending is also huge. In the financial year 2016/17, Kenya’s defence budget was $2.64 billion, three times higher than Tanzania’s at $838 million.

Ours is a robust and superior economy among our peers. Ideally, we are a regional power.

Yet, the proposal to import 500 doctors from Tanzania as an antidote to the malady in the public health sector was not just a medical matter, but a political and diplomatic one, too.

Kenya had gifted Tanzania a free trillion-dollar image and reputation boost. Yet Tanzanians were amused to learn that their doctors were desired in a country that is more advanced by all measures.

It may not have been in Tanzania’s foreign policy strategy to ride on its doctors for diplomatic victory, but hey, Kenya was offering an opportunity on a silver platter.

Such a move constructs the prestige, respect and admiration – that is the intangible asset - which states require to advance their interests.

Our crisis offered Tanzania an opportunity to manifest soft power and bolster its international image. Ironically, it is Kenya that needs to leverage on its advanced medical infrastructure and personnel as a source of soft power.

Our hospitals are far grander in the region so are our doctors- but, of course, the system needs an overhaul and improvement. A friend from South Sudan once mused that Kenya holds the key to his country’s peace. How? If only it can prevent the generals and warlords and their families from flying in for treatment.

Such is the capital we posses if only we could be smart enough to cash on it.
But medical diplomacy is not new. India is big on medical tourism, which analysts project to hit $8 billion by 2020. But no country has capitalised on this better than Cuba. Medical diplomacy is an integral part of Cuba’s foreign policy.

It has offered tens of thousands of its medical corps around the world. And from these medical expeditions, including scholarships, Cuba, a state of 11 million people and heavily saddled by US economic sanctions, has emerged stronger with many lauding its medical altruism.

It is this soft power constructed from a benevolent perspective that Cuba won accolades from the World Health Organisation.

And for 16 years, a majority of member states at the United Nations General Assembly, aware of Cuba’s medical diplomacy, voted for lifting of the US economic embargo.

So potent is Cuba’s medical diplomacy power that in 2006, the US engineered the Cuban Professional Parole Programme to seduce its doctors on missions abroad to defect.

Now that the Tanzania deal has flopped, Kenya needs a brisk health environment and an easily deployable medical corps.

We can truly call ourselves hegemonic when we offer our services to other states such as Somalia or South Sudan or respond to humanitarian crises as we did in West Africa during the Ebola scare.

Such will be a key antidote for extremism. And what if we impose medical sanctions against warlords?

Folks, we are sitting on a gold mine; we need to mine it.

Mr Wamanji is a public relations expert. [email protected] @manjis