Why spend more time gearing up for an outbreak than keeping virus out?
Travellers wait to be cleared at Kenya's immigration offices at the Kenya-Tanzania border in Namanga on August 20, 2014. The Kenyan border entry point had no health equipment to handle Ebola cases, especially from passengers arriving from West African countries (Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia) hit by the virus. PHOTO | JEFF ANGOTE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- Why is the ministry behaving as if it wants Ebola in Kenya? Is it so difficult to mobilise a small team of two or three doctors, working in shifts with four or five nurses, to check travellers at five border crossings?
- If President Kenyatta were sacking his security chiefs for lapses, as he, indeed, should, then he should have fired the Chief of Defence Forces, General Karangi over the Westgate burning mattresses/drinking water/looting fiasco.
- I have seen many dogs, I grew up with mongrels up every armpit, but this is the first dog I have seen that coils up, shaking like a leaf, and hides in bushes at the sight of me.
Kenya, I note with exasperation, is beginning to resemble the homestead of a cantankerous, middle-aged village woman. All conversations are conducted at the top of the voice. Reason is but a few blobs bobbing in a sewage of emotion.
Everything takes 10 times as long as it should, and 1,000 times more the effort. This, friends, is a tiresome place.
This week, I had intended to write about a little girl and her puppy, but how can I when we are facing the prospect of extinction by Ebola and the country’s spymaster has been faded away and another faded in?
Let me start with Ebola because it is the easier one. I don’t understand why the government is spending more time gearing up for an outbreak and less on keeping the virus out. It is total, stark, raving madness
And why does the Ministry of Health keep misleading us? It says screening is going on at border points, but when we get there, not only do we find no such thing, we also discover that our neighbours are doing a much better job.
POLITICISING SECURITY
Why is the ministry behaving as if it wants Ebola in Kenya? Is it so difficult to mobilise a small team of two or three doctors, working in shifts with four or five nurses, to check travellers at five border crossings?
What is the problem, is it the schedule you can’t do or you just don’t care? No wonder Kenyans these days just go to India.
Which brings me to Maj-Gen Philip Wachira Kameru. Those who criticise Kenya’s security establishment say the problem is that the security chiefs went into politics. I presume when the Special Branch was pulling out the nails and squeezing the testes of dissidents, it was politics by other means.
It is not possible to do anything more stupid than to politicise and ethnicise security services.
A long time ago, the army, GSU, police and Special Branch existed to keep the President in power. This would now be an exercise in futility and a waste of public funds because the exit of Kenyan presidents is now legislated; no one can be president forever.
All that effort and money would be better spent putting all this expensive stuff to the use for which it was intended.
KARANGI AND KIMAIYO
I think commentators have come to the agreement that Maj-Gen Michael Gichangi, General Kameru’s predecessor, was forced out because he did a bad job, what with Westgate, Lamu and the grenade festival we have had for a long time.
Personally, I think the situation is a lot more complex. If President Kenyatta were sacking his security chiefs for lapses, as he, indeed, should, then he should have fired the Chief of Defence Forces, General Karangi, over the Westgate burning mattresses/drinking water/looting fiasco.
Or the fact that Al-Shabaab maintains the capacity to raid us, even though we have boots on the ground in Somalia. And he would have sacked Inspector-General of Police David Kimaiyo for presiding over a service that has lost the capacity to crack crimes, arrest suspects, successfully prosecute criminals or adequately respond to emergencies.
I think it would be more constructive to comprehensively review Kenya’s security posture and reform these institutions to ensure that they are fit for purpose in the times we live in.
That to me would be a more rational and effective approach. I don’t think many people share that view. Dramafests make us feel better, they don’t solve problems.
* * *
Back to that little girl, a good friend of mine, whose birthday is today and whom I can safely backbite here because I know she does not read newspapers.
My friend, let me say this: I don’t understand your dog. I have seen many dogs, I grew up with mongrels up every armpit, but this is the first dog I have seen that coils up, shaking like a leaf, and hides in bushes at the sight of me.
Further, when you say he is the love of your life, I am confused. I mean, we have plants in the garden that have been there far longer than 11 years. It’s too soon to talk about life, isn’t it?
But, love and respect to all the little girls of Kenya and their puppies. If you are happy, and the puppies are happy, then the daddies are happy.
