I imagine that not every Johnnie-come-lately can get through the training needed to become a doctor or surgeon. By all accounts, the amount of twenty-four-hour swotting medical students engage in in order to append the prefix "Dr" before their names and the suffix "MD" after is simply staggering. Many of them also expand their intellectual muscles beyond Gray's Anatomy and the latest editions of the Physician's Desk Reference. You will happily listen to them expound on diverse subjects with a keen appreciation for the substance, if not the form. They are, quite often, delightful to be with. Sadly, they are a rapidly shrinking segment of the population, if not the academy.
Kenya's members of the medical profession are a funny lot these days. The pre-eminent example of the heights of achievement one can attain is a member of the national cabinet. Another one is an absentee deputy governor. Still another is a mouthpiece for the health ministry. What they have in common is a spectacularly horrific track record when it comes to keeping suffering Kenyans safe in the midst of a global pandemic that has ravaged homes, communities and the economy. It isn't that they have done bad things; that would be too easy in these days of social-media-fuelled blame-shifting. No. What they have one is to abdicate their senses - moral, intellectual, professional and social - and allowed the silver-tongued denizens of the Augean stables of national politics to carry the day whenever the question of public health comes up.
Indeed, in my opinion, the eponymous unsmiling member of the cabinet is the worst of the lot. He seems not to possess an ounce of humanity all the while executing un-human policies designed to academically segregate whole generations from their peers in other countries. He positively revels in acts designed to cow and humiliate his subordinates and underlings. He represents, as crassly as possible, the sentiments pervading the cabinet itself and he will not be deterred from demonstrating that if he were given the power to di, he would lead a nation without humans. Not a one. It would be clean, safe, un-corrupt, efficient - cold and sterile, like a surgical theatre.
Their kind is now prevalent across the land, spreading ominously like the epidemic decimating our families. Lawyers, accountants, teachers, nurses, engineers and architects are extolling the vicious virtues of more and more un-human policies, policies, if implemented, will convert humans into mere numbers, statistical datasets more useful in justifying the transfer of large wads of taxpayers' cash into the coffers of private corporations. Humans, people with needs and wants, are anathema to the utopia being preached to us by the likes of the waziri and his colleagues. Human messy-ness is a flaw, rather than a vital feature of our humanity, and must be stamped out by the bullet, if need be.
It has never occurred to them that they did not come of age in vacuums; they are patent reflections of the psychic tortures they visit on their fellowman. The more they impose restrictions, controls and violence on us, the worse their pristine country becomes shambolic, disheveled and untidy. The leafy-ness of their suburbs is being decimated because the same decimation they visited on the hovel-strewn neighbourhoods in the East has followed them home. Over the past one year, they have pursued the single-minded goal of subverting the will of the people, throwing public health caution to the four winds and as a result, visited on the people they intend to rule with an iron rod a horror of epic proportions. That horror has come back to bite them, and you can see them, their representatives and their apologists succumbing, one by one.
Of course they will push to the front when the vaccines come, but because they have flung open the national gates to all the nasty variants, the vaccine will do them no good, and as they are felled one after the other, felled in the same cruel way as the people they have cruelly defiled, they will have no savior. None of us will. Some of them will end up with grand mausoleums, edifices to their egos and the memories of their egos, but when the maggots come for their embalmed arses, the only difference between them and us will be the volume of hypocritical wailing at their passing. In everything else, the six feet of soil between them and the living, they will be our peers, if not a bit lower down.
No comments:
Post a Comment