Babies' deaths in Kiambu must be a national concern

This week reports emerged that over 100 children died in the past year in Kiambu alone due to a doctors' strike. Of course, attribution is not always straightforward. It is hard to say which deaths could have been avoided had the doctors been working. However, the bigger issue is that we live in a country where public officials readily tolerate extreme forms of failure. In a situation like this in Kiambu, did health authorities have the data to monitor goings on during the strike? Could they have intervened after, say, the 9th death? Or 80th? Why does it seem like the loss of precious little babies is not enough to move public officials? There is a saying that the worst tolerated behaviour defines the culture. In Kenya, unfortunately, the worst thing anyone can do - commit acts that lead to loss of life - is readily tolerated. We have a public culture of not valuing human life. From lives of infants, to mothers, to young men in the streets, to old people needing critical care, as a society we simply do not value human life. And so we lack systems to preserve life, or make lives comfortable. A lot of our collective failures are downstream of this simple fact. Our health system. Our school system. Our road system. Our water system. Our food inspection system. Our regulations of all manner of products used by our people. We just do not have it in us to be mindful of how our actions impact real people in the real world. Bizarrely, this devaluation of life is also deeply internalised by policymakers. They also do not value their own lives or those of their families. The lack of working systems has an impact on their quality of life. To use a trivial example, the poor state of our public spaces means they cannot take comfortable walks with their loved ones. They only get to do that when spending our money on foreign trips. When they come back, they have to live with us in the dust and non-existent pavements just like everyone else. Which brings us back to Kiambu infant deaths. Officially, our infant mortality rate now stands just under 30 deaths per 1,000 live births (3 per cent). Getting here was a long slog. In the early 1960s about 10 per cent of babies born in Kenya died before they were five. Policy and learning then shifted that number to 6 per cent by mid 1980s, before policy failures and collapse of the health system forced it up to 7 per cent a decade later. The sustained improvements of the last 30 years are therefore to be celebrated - and the more reason why we cannot allow the number to creep up again. If the loss of babies cannot give us pause, what can? And if we allow ourselves to be hard-hearted about infant deaths, what kind of society will we become? The writer is a professor at Georgetown University

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Babies' deaths in Kiambu must be a national concern

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