Kenya's nurses have now been on strike for 44 days, and the country's health system is paying the price.
The Kenya National Union of Nurses is demanding full implementation of the 2017 Collective Bargaining Agreement, permanent and pensionable appointment letters for nurses recruited under Universal Health Coverage, and adoption of the revised career progression guidelines approved by the Public Service Commission over a year ago. None of these are new or unreasonable demands.
They have simply gone unmet for years, through successive rounds of negotiation and broken promises. Nurses are not alone. Doctors under the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union have their own grievance, over delayed implementation of salary adjustments anchored in the same 2017 CBA and a Return-to-Work Formula signed in 2024.
For weeks, doctors have held hospitals together in the nurses' absence. That they now threaten to join the strike in sympathy is a warning the government cannot afford to ignore. Should they walk out, Kenya would face a near-total collapse of public health services, with the sick, the pregnant and the dying left with nowhere to turn.
Are we prepared for that? Nothing in the government's conduct so far suggests it is. Both the national government and the Council of Governors have been blaming each other for the worsening crisis. Meanwhile, patients wait in empty wards.
This is not a new pattern. Kenya's health sector has lurched from one strike to another since the function was partially devolved, with each crisis resolved only after enough damage has been done-in terms of loss of lives. That cycle is unsustainable and, frankly, unconscionable in a country that guarantees the right to health under its Constitution.
Genuine resolution requires both levels of government to stop treating this as a jurisdictional dispute and start treating it as what it is; a matter of life and death. Continued inaction, as doctors weigh joining the strike, is no longer merely poor governance. It is a demonstrated disregard for human life, and Kenyans deserve far better from those they have entrusted with their care.
