Pandemic teaches us that we are on our own; let’s plan for it

Skin head, dead head

Everybody gone bad

Situation, aggravation

Everybody allegation

In the suite, on the news

Everybody dog food

Bang bang, shot dead

Everybody's gone mad

All I want to say is that

They don't really care about us

All I want to say is that

They don't really care about us

— Michael Jackson, "They Don’t Really Care about Us," in his 1995 album, HIStory: Past, Present and Future.

Michael Jackson (God bless his disturbed soul) was not a great thinker or poet; there are musicians more gifted than him.

But I was listening to that song on Thursday and thinking about the decision by US President Donald Trump to cut funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO) — amid a global pandemic that, by 7pm Thursday, had infected 1,995,983 people and killed 131,037.

As luck would have it, I was stopped and ticked off by KFS staff over social distancing in the forest jogging track.

My mask was on, and I think I was maintaining more than two metres, but I couldn’t have been prouder of the seriousness with which the issue was being taken.

By the way, mask compliance is up to about 70 per cent and I am very happy to see that folks who don’t have the funds to splash out on factory-made protection are making their own and wearing them. That’s how we will survive this thing.

CRITICAL MOMENT

The WHO does not have any enforcement powers but it is an important sentinel, detecting and alerting the world to health dangers such as this disease outbreak.

It also has programmes to improve access to health in poor countries and development of vaccines.

It has a $4.4 billion two-year budget, 15 per cent of which comes from the US. According to the New York Times, the US decides how its contribution is used — mainly on Aids, cancer, heart disease and others; only 2.3 per cent goes to disease outbreak control.

My research shows that the WHO has been accused of being too friendly with China, uncritically accepting what the Chinese told it and not moving fast enough in January to declare the novel coronavirus a global threat.

But everybody, from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to researchers and scientists, seem to agree that now is not the time to cut funding.

The world faces a deadly threat whose exact nature is yet to be known and the WHO is all we have bringing us together against it.

Mr Trump is, of course, playing politics. And he is doing so at two levels. First, he has an election coming up in November and he has been roundly criticised for initially minimising the risk posed by the virus.

He is widely quoted as saying it was no worse than the seasonal flu and also claiming, wrongly, that the US was in control of the epidemic when it clearly wasn’t.

AGENCY'S ROLE

Generally, Trump has been anti-science and impatient with the measures required to tame the virus.

He has been a lot more mindful of the economic impact of those measures, arguing that the cure shouldn’t be more harmful than the disease. He probably sees the economy as critical to his re-election.

At the second level, the US is in serious competition with China for global influence. Trump, probably, is punishing an organisation he views as having participated in Chinese “disinformation”, as he puts it.

I suppose Trump does not see any role for the WHO in the capacity of Europe and North America to deal with Covid-19.

He probably thinks the WHO only works to support poor countries in Africa, South America and Asia, with the kind of people he simply doesn’t care about.

Our greatest failure as Africans is that we are trusting and guileless. Against all demonstrable evidence to the contrary, we expect that people will come from America, Europe and Asia to sort out the mess we find ourselves in, most of it of our own creation.

What Covid-19 has demonstrated to us is that every country must develop systems for its own survival, that there will be times when foreign countries will be looking to the interests and survival of their own people and would have no time or resources to come and help.

APATHY

Kenya has the human resource, and the money, to build a healthcare system that would guarantee the survival of its people in such a situation.

But ours is not a system that respects merit or prudent application of public resources. A political culture anchored in corruption and tribalism is not conducive to an environment where the best talent rises to the top.

I saw Barack Obama on TV arguing that government matters. It is an argument that Kenyans ought to listen to.

The middle class many a time looks down its nose at the business of politics and government as too dirty, too corrupt, to become involved in.

This virus has taught us that, no matter how much money we have in the bank, or how big we are in our professions, there are things that we can’t individually buy: we have to have an effective, functioning government.

I hope when we emerge from lockdown we will all take a keen interest in how our affairs are managed.

Because, truth be told, out there, with the Chinese beating Kenyans in the streets over a disease that came from their own country, nobody really cares about us.

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