We all lose when we treat professionals badly

Doctors at the Nakuru Level Five Hospital demonstrate on September 26, 2016. Doctors are still on strike. PHOTO | SULEIMAN MBATIAH | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Hence, the relationship between a government and professionals is one of the best indices of leadership.
  • This health care crisis is a product of leadership ineptitude and is borne of disdain for professionals in a country where political expedience overrides national policy.
  • In any case, governments that survive by sidelining and manipulating professionals hardly achieve much.

That a society is as good as its institutions cannot be gainsaid.

There are primary institutions that shape our consciousness as we grow up — parents, school (teachers), the church, the media, and the government.

They all work in synergy to mould our personal and national character.

It is normal, for instance, for parents to invoke a teacher’s name when disciplining their children and vice versa.

Similarly, when we remind our children that the doctor ordered that they eat more vegetables, we are invoking the doctor’s institutional authority to make children eat healthy.

The government transcends almost all the others, setting the pace and pattern of their interactions, while employing professionals in many of these institutions.

Hence, the relationship between a government and professionals is one of the best indices of leadership.

Good governments nurture institutions by supporting professionals to excel so that the society benefits.

Nations that do best correspondingly invest heavily in their professionals and involve them in the mainstream of policy implementation, research, and enterprise.

On the other hand, incompetent governments relate poorly with professionals.

IDEOLOGICAL HYPOCRISY

They begrudge their influence and seek to erode their social standing so that they do not outshine the government.

That is why tyranny and poor leadership almost always results in brain drain as professionals seek a better working environment.

School has been weakened due to the tribulations facing the teaching fraternity.

Frequent work boycotts have led to news fatigue such that teachers now invite public ridicule rather than sympathy when they issue a strike threat.

This has been made worse by the maladroit handling of teachers’ grievances that has seen everything made public knowledge to the point that even the pupils know how much their teachers earn and when the salaries are delayed.

Effectively, teachers have lost their professional dignity and the attendant institutional authority and our education is the loser, as attested by wanton indiscipline and mass failures.

And now doctors are lined up for similar humiliation.

The protracted doctors’ strike with little intervention from the government will do to doctors and other health workers what it has done to teachers; it will exhaust them with indifference and threats, and most will bow to public pressure and resume duty, humiliated and demoralised.

The quality of health care services will plummet and we shall all be the losers.

Some church leaders, portraying themselves as custodians of reason and justice, have asked doctors to sympathise with the sick and resume work on humanitarian grounds.

But this appeal masks their ideological hypocrisy.

The clergy conveniently refuses to question why we never have enough money to pay our professionals well, yet our parasitic politicians are among the best paid in the world.

SOLVE PROBLEM

Neither do they query why we never seem to lack money to waste on endless corruption scams.

This health care crisis is a product of leadership ineptitude and is borne of disdain for professionals in a country where political expedience overrides national policy.

A country where leaders have failed to harness the expertise of our gifted professionals and scholars to deliver us from poverty and underdevelopment.

The recent mass failure in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination stresses a fundamental fact: that we can force teachers back to class, but we cannot force them to teach.

Similarly, we can force doctors and nurses back to the wards, but the treatment and care of patients cannot be commandeered under a demeaning professional atmosphere.

In any case, governments that survive by sidelining and manipulating professionals hardly achieve much.

Mr Njaga is a travel consultant. [email protected]