Virus may be bad, but deadlier evils lurk around the corner

Road accidents, malaria, the ongoing landslides and floods have individually killed more people than the novel coronavirus in a span of a month, ushering in a devastating traditional disaster season for the country.

Yet, even as the tolls from these disasters rise, the country’s responsiveness, which includes fundraising, deployment of emergency and medical staff, as well as public service announcements all seem focussed on one element: fighting the virus. It is time the government thinks of other disasters as well, and spreads out its response to include these re-emerging threats to Kenyan lives.

The weatherman warns heavy rains will continue well into next week. The consequence of this is countrywide death, displacement and destruction.

We cannot predict the exact spot and time a landslide will happen. We can’t predict who will be struck down next by malaria, but learning from our history, we can get a general idea of when these will start as well as potential hotspots, according us enough time to set up interventions to lessen the disasters’ sting during this season.

Floods are making a nonsense of social distancing initiatives. Entire villages have been swept away, forcing neighbours to huddle together in search of security in numbers. Locusts are no longer making it to daily news bulletins, yet farmers across Kenya’s breadbasket remain worried that as soon as their treasured crops break through the soil, locust swarms will descend upon them and erase all hope of future harvest. Yet interventions are few and sporadic. Many farmers have resigned themselves to fate.

Road accidents continue to leave their ugly mark in the daily lives of Kenyans. Tragically, the country has become numbed to the anguish caused by these crashes that unless a family member dies, the scary numbers remain just a blip; another sad story in the news insufficient to warrant outrage among the people.

Our obsession with reactionary interventions has resulted in us being forever reliant on short-term solutions. Successive governments, including the current Jubilee administration, have always fallen short in disaster mitigation, planning and management.

We continuously remain reliant on a political system that demands blind faith from an electorate too busy fighting for survival to demand more accountability for the taxes they pay. As a result, when landslides bury entire clans, or malaria paralyses entire sub-locations we look to a cluster of politicians and individuals within government for help. The reality is that these individuals are well aware that in their twisted worlds, there are no points to be scored for averting disaster.

Instead, they sit on Marshal Plans developed by technocrats, knowing all too well that political points are only scored from parachuting into tragedies with carloads of blankets and cartons of powdered milk and distributing them to the less fortunate in the full glare of cameras to get shots for the next campaign poster.

Disaster mitigation is not rocket science. The government can learn from best practice around the world. Heck, if we can send delegations to Europe to learn about dairy farming, it is only fair that we get decision makers learning about the Mexican disaster relief fund and the successes it has recorded, or the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency or how relief aid agencies run their forecast-based disaster financing models, ensuring planned responses whenever the unthinkable happens.

But unless we deal with our near uncontrollable urge to dip our hands into the disaster fund cookie jars whenever the central government feels it needs a quick injection of cash into one project or another, we will remain forever at the mercy of nature.

It is OK to have the Covid-19 Emergency Response Fund and implement the raft of measures that the pandemic has elicited from the State. But we should also remember that road accidents, malaria, floods, landslides and many other perils that always seem to be around the corner are claiming lives every day, and no one is talking about them.