By Silas Nyanchwani
ON KNH.
One of the most unfortunate thing about the black/African race is that we don’t value ourselves enough. We have very little sense of what human dignity is. Whereas we have a strong sense of family and community and tribalism, but collectively, as a race we treat each other like shit.
The damning allegations on macabre stuff going on at Kenyatta Hospital made me queasy a great deal of the day. You can’t put it past human beings to do some of the bizarre things, totally beyond human comprehension. I have been inside a labour ward, and I can tell you if all men stepped in, they will understand how precious life is, the reason it hurts me when I see those street children in town.
As a journalist, the last three years, I have tried to report on health issues, and getting information from government authority is an impossible task. The government exists to hide information even when it is absolutely unnecessary. You call a typical government functionary, and they never pick your call, when they do, they will stonewall you or insult you. Unless it is something that can give them publicity and attract some funding, they are always cage, always out of office. Until you write the story and they will call fuming and threaten the journalist.
Kenyatta Hospital is a disgrace. The hospital stuff is overwhelmed. The hospital is so grossly underfunded, and government bureaucracy makes it impossible to even buying photocopying papers.
Yet, this need not be the case. Committing a few more billions, building a few new wards, hiring more nurses, can transform the hospital into an overnight success, deriving patients from across East and Central Africa and this can spur development in unseen ways.
But securing and procuring something like CCTVs, hiring more security and ensuring the hospital operates efficiently is such a difficult task. I still think, there is something wrong about the black skin. We can’t fail at such basic stuff. All you read in the news is about doctors striking, health officials stealing even money meant for AIDS patients.
It is a shame that Nairobi Hospital, across the road from Kenyatta has been expanding exponentially, building new wards and all, yet it derives all their doctors from Kenyatta.
It is a bad country where one doctor delivers world-class service to one set of patients and shitty services to another set of patients, separated merely by 50 metres.
Wherever you are, eating, drinking, about to sleep, dancing, whatever you are doing, just know as the black race, we need some soul searching. We only have one life, yet we spend it hurting each other like there is another life to live.
You can’t have a hospital named after the first family, the biggest in an entire Coast of East Coast of Africa and act like it is OK.
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