Photo: Hon Moses Kuria and Oscar Sudi have taken the war on inequality to Uhuru’s door step. They blasted the President over the demolition of Kariobangi homes to create a sewerage system that is linked to Northlands City.
By M N
If you have never lived in Budalangi or Nyando, perhaps, you will not understand how and why people are swept by floods when it pours. If your brother has never been felled by a police bullet on mere suspicion of being a criminal, you may feel the nagging urge to support extrajudicial killings.
If your mother or father has never been neglected to death in a public health facility, it is quite tempting not to be moved by our crumbling public healthcare system.
Privilege can blindfold. It can give you a false sense of entitlement and security to think that you are cushioned from the excesses of the government or the wrath of nature.
When you watch from a rear bird’s-view the suffering of other people, you may not feel empathetic until you put yourselves in their shoes. Hunger and starvation, drought and floods, pauperism and lacking, and insecurity and senseless violence have never shaken our country’s upper-cut class.
That is why last year, a politician known for pathological lies bluntly refuted the claims that people were dying from hunger in the far-flung counties of Garissa, Turkana, and West Pokot in a presser. This was, ostensibly, to to save the image of a government that is now eating him bit by bit.
But since the outbreak of Covid-19, it seems our politicians have begun shuddering at the thought of contracting a virus that has overwhelmed sophisticated healthcare systems of countries they used to run to when experiencing mild headaches.
The skewed policies that have entrenched inequalities to favor the rich and run roughshod on the poor are finally turning around to bite their makers and proponents. The straightforwardness, soberness, philanthropism, and advocacy for people-centered policies are now the business of the rich; politicians, moguls, and corporate heads.
The maxim for the rich is now simple; if they do they are doomed, if they don’t they are damned. Whether or not they are positive for Coronavirus is totally out of question.
There is no running to the United Kingdom to seek treatment for liver diseases. There is no running to India to seek comprehensive chemotherapy and cancer treatment. There is no running to the United States for reconstructive surgery when your son’s circumcision goes haywire.
We are all here, poor and rich. It’s either we get out alive or dead.
Henceforth, we must stop normalizing and adoring inequality, incompetence, mediocrity, poverty, corruption, suffering, starvation, and privilege talks. One way or the other, our actions or inaction will, in the long run, catch up with us.
We must strive to build a society where profiteering is not the cardinal intention for the provision of healthcare, education, water, and security. Public goods must remain public goods. We must begin treating any form of suffering as inhuman to warrant immediate, comprehensive, and genuine action.
To those who lived fueling cheap talks of meting police brutality on those who didn’t support the government and benefited from the impunity of this regime by doing its bidding, it’s your turn to cry in the trenches. To those who lived making policies that strip the poor people of their dignity, it is now time for those health policies to rob you of your privilege too.
Until then, hasta la vista!
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