Kenya's is a Governance, not a Cancer Crisis

Now that senior political and corporate leaders are dying of cancer, there is this annoyingly shallow call for government to declare cancer a national disaster. It makes me remember that not long ago some of us were making noise about government policy decisions on Kenyan labor issues. Surely we must not forget how disastrous Uhuru’s government handled the doctors' strike. Even when they were actually calling for reforms in the sector. This government stopped at nothing to intimidate doctors. It jailed doctors’ union leaders and went on to threaten to sack them and hire “cheap” foreign doctors etc. Surely you must not have forgotten that it is under Uhuru's government that Kenya witnessed the longest nurses' strike in the history of Kenya (and the world by the way). Surely we must never forget that Uhuru's relatives are among the looters of Afya House. 

The problem in Kenyan public health sector, just like other sectors, including education, is a combination of endemic system rot, ineptness in management of public affairs and theft of public resources. It boils down to lack of visionary leadership. Stop this sick call for declaration of cancer as a national disaster and start working on better governance in Kenya. My sister died of cancer in 2011, we only discovered she died of ovarian cancer during a post-mortem. I know thousands like her have died in silence not only of cancer but no numerous other preventable and curable diseases. And if we do not focus on where the real issues are, we can be sure that many more are going to keep dying. Uhuru should stop the theft and ineptness at Afya house and must open national conversation and process of overhaul and fundamental reforms in public health. It can't be done through his nonsensical Universal Health Care (UHC) program which, like the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC), is both poorly conceived and un-implementable.