I begin with an analogy. There was once a poultry farmer who sold his neighbour a very expensive chick claiming that it could fly. As time passed by, the neighbour began complaining that the “bird” was not flying as promised.
The farmer insisted that he should give it more time to grow more feathers for it to fly.
That is what Social Health Authority (SHA) is, a bird that was sold to us expensively that it could fly, but with each passing day, it is becoming clearer that it was never meant to fly! Chickens were never meant to fly.
You may throw them up but they will all fall down and if you ask the poultry farmer, he will tell you that at least it flapped its wings and that you should give it more time to grow more feathers! Dear Kenyans, I have news for you, SHA will never fly! It was never meant to! It may have wings, a beak, claws, just like a bird, but it is not a bird and we must demand for the bird that we were promised.
Families are suffering, many conditions have complicated, limbs have been amputated, kidneys have failed, eyes have gone blind and lives have been lost in the delay because health waits for no one yet our politicians are telling us to be more patient, months after they had insisted that this “bird” was capable of flying.
We refuse to wait any longer because unlike schools that can get capitations in the next term or roads that can be fixed in the next financial cycle, life once lost, cannot be regained, limbs once lost cannot grow like a lizards tail.
For the amounts that we are contributing, Kenyans deserve premium services not lip services. As health professionals, we have been patient with SHA’s implementation because we know everything takes time, but now we saying that the prognosis is very poor especially with the “laboratory report” from the Auditor General’s office confirming that SHA is malignant! To stay quiet would be to be complicit.
With this report, the MPs have a second chance to redeem themselves after throwing Kenyans under the bus because as professional bodies, we warned them that SHA as designed, was not meant to serve anyone except shadowy business owners and self-proclaimed economic experts.
Allocating Sh4 billion to primary healthcare fund against a demand for Sh60 billion or allocating emergency, chronic and critical illness fund Sh2 billion against a demand for one Sh100 billion is akin to attempting to feed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread, a statistical impossibility even if you tithe Sh20 million every Sunday.
Our demands are simple, let the MPs debate and implement the Auditor General’s report and make necessary amendments to the SHA act to ensure that Kenyans get the health that they deserve, at the right time without suffering any catastrophic financial loss, otherwise this SHA story will be their waterloo.
Kenyans may be very forgiving, but I doubt if they can forgive those who make them lose their limbs or loved ones.
To Baba Raila Odinga, your ODM supporters pay the highest price in a broken health system because of the high poverty index, the high disease burden occasioned by HIV, Malaria, Sickle cell disease, Tuberculosis and waterborne diseases rampant around the lake region.
If you want them to support your broad-based government and possibly vote for RUTO in 2027, then they first have to be alive, speak for them sir.
The writer is a consultant obstetric and gynaecologist and the National Deputy Secretary General at KMPDU. Email: [email protected]
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