COVID IN KENYA NEEDS TO END!
I know that I should look at Covid as a “blessing in disguise”. That this is just a “season of life”.
I know that it's not all bad… that there are things that Covid has taught us that we may never have learned otherwise…
But…
This thing COVID needs to end. Seriously.
I’ve had enough of Covid. I think many other people have enough too. But here in Africa, it's different…
In Kenya, where I live. The population is 93% Asymptomatic. Of the 63,244 total cases, we’ve had to date, 1,130 people have died. Bear in mind that is in 7–8 months of Covid.
What's crazy is that in 2019, if you had told me that same number of people were going to die in 8 months from the ‘flu’… I wouldn’t have flinched. Because that number sounds negligible. I think more Kenyans die from traffic accidents or malaria than COVID! (Though I have no stats to back that up… it's just a feeling).
But maybe you can give the Kenyan Government the credit because of all of the measures they put in place to curb the spread…
Nah! I beg to differ…
When Covid first arrived. Kenya just copied the west. We shut-down schools, we imposed a curfew, and a lot of businesses, including mine, were forced to stop operating.
Let me just stop there and explain that, for the majority of Kenyans, staying home is not an option. Let me give you more context. Of all the people who are employed in this country, 10% of them work in the formal sector. The formal sector is where you have a salary and your insurance is paid for — you’re basically a typical worker that can “work from home”.
But then there’s the 90% of employed people who work in the ‘informal sector’. This means they don’t get a payslip at the end of the month, and there’s no insurance or benefits. Just let that sink in for a minute.
You can’t tell the 90% of us in such vulnerable situations to “work from home”. It's just not an option. If you’re getting 300–400 Shillings a day from going out and working manual labor or selling goods in the market, staying home means you earn nothing. So “Utakufa na njaa, ama Corona… We ungechagua gani?” (You’ll die from hunger or Corona, which would you choose?).
“Utakufa na njaa, ama Corona… We ungechagua gani?” (You’ll die from hunger or Corona, which would you choose?).
It's no wonder that our “measures” are not working. Because people need to work to sustain their livelihoods. And I know the west is praising how we’ve managed to “flatten our curve”, and how “Africa is winning the fight against Covid better than the west”. But if we’re honest, let's take our praise with a pinch of salt… in fact a large batch of salt that makes the meal inedible. Because I honestly don’t believe, the spread has been curbed by the “government measures”, it's been curbed by the fact that Kenyans don’t die from Corona — plain and simple. We’re tough!
So maybe, just maybe, let's stop copying the west. Let's treat the COVID problem with Kenyan solutions. Because what the west is doing does not work for us. We are suffering. People are suffering. Distancing is just not an option.
END
Thanks for reading this. I just had an argument with someone about Corona and it spurred be to write this… LOL. Now you have context.
