Somebody tell Mbadi we're sick and dying as a nation, so let's die in private dignity

Treasury CS John Mbadi before the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning, at Glee Hotel, Kiambu Road, on January 13, 2026. [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

John Mbadi, the Treasury Cabinet Secretary, is the maverick who has reportedly cast a magic wand on the economy, precipitating an unexpected outcome: the nation’s GDP is on an upward trajectory, even though the economy has contracted and the citizens are damn broke.

Mbadi's purported economic wizardry is akin to what youths in the streets call pandisa, which means a fanciful conflation of things. I’d call it a pack of crap, but since I’m respectful, I’ll spare that epithet to assess Mbadi’s diatribe earlier in the week, when he admonished Kenyans for their rejection of US efforts to access our health data.

I’ll let Mbadi speak for himself so that we gain some insights about his thought process. “When the US government has offered to support us, then some of us here in Kenya go to challenge it based on data privacy. If I am sick, what privacy do I need, and if I’m dying?

“There is no privacy I need, even if there was anything (sic) compromising. And what would America be doing with the privacy of our health records, honestly? We kill some progressive things that are supposed to help us. We are the first country that was going to benefit from this help.”

I don’t know where Mbadi went to school, but this sounds pretty asinine. As a bean counter, one assumes Mbadi would understand what data means. It’d mean Americans turning our nation into a laboratory where big pharma would test their unwholesome drugs, the sort that they can’t test on their own people, or anywhere else for that matter. After all, we don’t dignify ourselves.

And why do we need Americans’ help when we’re running one of the most vibrant economies south of the Sahara anyway? Finally, what would we expect from America when it has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation, among other international fora, and its leadership declared they want to put America front and centre of everything they do?

If we’re sick and dying as a nation, and I think we are, the last fragments of our humanity that we’d need is to die in dignity. If only the Mbadis of this world would let us. Bure kabisa.