Kenya's health sector suffering political negligence

It is barely three weeks into the New Year and the country is in election mode. The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has launched its plan worth Sh45 billion.

Elections do matter because it means something to the lives of the people. And they must be important now that they cost nearly as expensive as our annual Health budget if campaign funds are not factored in.

But often, the political jig-saw is awash with utopian manifestos whose implementation is immediately forgotten after winners celebrate victory. No sector has suffered political negligence as much as the Health sector.

The Presidential Debate of 2013 for example, had each presidential candidate promise to make better terms and conditions of work for healthcare workers. Then after Jubilee assumed Government, health workers were hurriedly bundled like goods and dumped to the counties in the name of devolution.

Signed Collective Bargaining Agreements were dishonoured. The Transition Authority kept silent and what unfolded was a broken referral system, a tale of cholera outbreaks with nearly 73 deaths in Nairobi County alone, 43 county strikes in two years and mass exodus of both nurses and doctors.

And the count is yet to stop. No one single regime since independence has paid any attention to the real health issues facing Kenyans.

Neither has Government worked closely with health staff to cure the sector of the virus of mediocrity.

The health sector is seemingly a happenstance not deserving of the billions of taxes collected from Kenyans, at least in the minds of many a politician. As if that is not enough, the cries of health workers have attracted no response from the drivers of politics.

On the flipside, the healthcare scene looks so busy. Ambulances have been bought in large numbers to ferry patients from counties unable to offer health services to their own people, to the main two referral hospitals; Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital and the Kenyatta hospitals. County governments have no interest whatsoever in employing enough specialists or equipping their county hospitals to offer quality services.

Some hospitals are being painted and every governor is either building a hospital gate, a latrine or purchasing exorbitant curtains. Every monthly supply of drugs is a political launch to the shame of patients who lack regular meals, leave alone basic medicines.

The drug launch ceremonies cost much more than the cost of the medicines for all the counties combined. The quality of the medicines can only be speculated as the regular supplies from Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa) are not assured.

Not surprising, health workers are still suffering  from issues of poor pay, stalled promotions, lack of transfer procedures, delayed salaries and unremitted statutory and union deductions. Doctors no longer have their employment numbers and pay slips at the national government and in several counties, hence are not credit-worthy even within a Sacco.

]This is a sure recipe for corruption and pay manipulation. The appointments of Dr Cleopa Mailu and Dr Nicholas Muraguri as Cabinet Secretary and Principal Secretary respectively for the Ministry of Health, were received with hope and high expectations among healthcare workers.

Given their understanding and experience in the health sector, they command in their own right, respect and admiration among the health professionals needed necessary to revamp the sector, especially in the management of Human Resources for Health; the key pillar for an effective healthcare system.

Health workers can only expect that the two health managers who are themselves highly-esteemed health professionals would place people first in the formulation of health policies and thus reform Afya House from its long standing image of a place where serious labour atrocities and corruption reign.

But given the influence of politics on Health, health workers too must arise to contribute to the Health agenda now and in the future to achieve sanity in the sector.