Like Monopoly money.

Kenya's national flag carrier, Kenya Airways (KQ), lost 25.7 billion shillings last financial years. The government bailed out Mumias Sugar (MSC) last month with a billion shillings. The Auditor-General reports that 66 billion shillings cannot be accounted for in the 2013/2014 financial year. A billion here. A billion there. It's Monopoly money when the word "billion" is bandied about with such ease. It's always someone elses money.

We bandy these numbers about without considering what they mean any more. A billion is a very large number to a very large number of Kenyans. The majority, in fact. There is a tiny minority that thinks of a billion as the bare minimum. These are these are the men, and an even tinier number of women, who command attention at the highest levels of government. They receive the right attention from the government.

Yet we remain poor. Poor people behave like poor people behave. Charles Onyango-Obbo has a humourous description of a visiting bigwig and new dresses worn in turn to impress the bigwig. He was writing in the context of the primping up of our city for the visiting United States' President, but he could just have easily been talking about Kenyans who struggle to get by living cheek-to-jowl with other equally struggling Kenyans while a tiny elite dreams up new schemes to line their bulging pockets with billions more.

This is the twenty-first century. Except for lifestyle diseases, and a few devastatingly efficient tropical virus, there is little new in the world of diseases. Mumps, measles and rubella used to wipe out infants until infant vaccination became a mandatory requirement. So too did tetanus, polio, diarrhoea and whooping cough. Vaccines and other therapies made childhood mortality rates to plunge. Modern medicine has all but wiped out polio and small pox from the world. Except in Kenya.

The government will find billions to bail out Kenya Airways, just as it found a spare billion to bail out Mumias Sugar. It will, however, rely on "development partners" to "fight" polio, malaria, and tuberculosis. By and large, the tiny elite and the small-ish middle-class will enjoy a measure of security when it comes to their health. The poor will not. The poor who form the vast majority of Kenyans - and the vast majority of the victims of preventable diseases. Those billions that seem to vanish into thin air will not be recovered, and if they are recovered, they will be dedicated to monuments of the pampered elite: "super" highways; technocities; railways; ports; presidential visits; and the harems that "keep them young."