‘Good’ Covid-era news, and KDF meat

The Nation has just acted like the proverbial thief in the night, and will get away with it. Last September, Nation Media Group relaunched its flagship Nation online publication as Nation.Africa, and offered premium articles that you need to register to read. And so, we registered.

My spies at the Twin Towers, the binocular-shaped headquarters of NMG, tell me by end of December 2020, nearly 200,000 people had registered (nearly double its current circulation), and in recent weeks the enrolment was running at about 1,000 a day.

On Friday morning, when I logged in to read a premium article, I was told I might want to buy a subscription. The paywall had been quietly sneaked in on the night of December 31.

There were various options on offer, and when I looked at the one-year plan, it didn’t look too bad. So, I bought that one. NMG, like many big companies, is not famous for pulling off things like this seamlessly, but the subscription platform is really simple and nifty.

There are a couple of things that are significant about this. It’s an example of how to cash in on the massive new wave of migration online, brought on by our flight from physical public spaces as we hide from coronavirus, and another early taste of how our local post-Covid universe might look like.

Secondly, it represents the first serious attempt in East Africa by a previously legacy publisher, to transition to a subscription model. Its success could have a far-reaching impact on how other publishers in the region act in the coming two to three years.

Zero cases in emergency wards

It is one of the many things that have happened during the Covid Terror, and might have a last impact. I was talking to a clever doctor friend at one of Nairobi’s top hospitals a short while back. Unlike in the past, he had a lot of time for me. He came clean, telling me he and most doctors, have very few patients.

The striking thing, he told me, is that they were looking at both the numbers from their hospital, and all over the country, and while the Covid-19 pandemic was raging, they thought the country had “become much healthier”.

It seemed a crazy thing to say, but he explained that they are beginning to see the results of something that would have been impossible to get at previously – how an over-sanitising, hand washing, acutely health-conscious, and face mask wearing looks like.

All those children with running noses and coughs, he said, had all but disappeared. Things like diarrhoea and food poisoning, with a lot more home-cooked meals being eaten, and travel restricted, were almost history. The only disease that hadn’t retreated was cancer, he said.

If you consider what is happening in South Africa, where the first lockdown with curfews and booze bans, and the latest one, have led to zero cases in emergency wards, it is likely a version of it is happening in Kenya.

With curfew still on, and therefore no all-night partying, the number of drunk-driving deaths, must be sharply down. We wait for the data, but when the numbers are added, he suggested that Kenya’s healthiest year might be its pandemic year.

The other story of 2020, which is now off the radar, is when amidst raging Covid-19 rampage, the Kenya Meat Commission was transferred to the Ministry of Defence – or specifically, the Kenya Defence Forces. Twitter had a field day with it.

Soldiers in meat business

As last year ended, I sat down with someone who would know, to hear what some have labelled “madness”. He told me, it actually it is one of the best story of 2020.

As he told it, the generals went to President Uhuru Kenyatta and told him the madness is that the Kenya military is importing canned beef from abroad, when it could be made locally.

They told the big man that if they were given the Meat Commission, they would turn it around and make their beef and a profit. The President asked them how much it would cost. They told him, “nothing”. They didn’t want any money from the government. The only thing they wanted was a grace period to make money, and pay the people who had supplied the Meat Commission with animals, and hadn’t been paid. They were owed billions, and some of them hadn’t been paid for close to four years.

The President did his thing, and the soldiers went into the meat business. We read reports that by November, two months after taking over operations, the military-run Meat Commission had paid Sh250 million owed to livestock farmers.

By Christmas, my source said, perhaps hyperbolically, the farmers who were once sending the Meat Commission letters from their threatening to drag them to court for their money, were “sending them Christmas cards and chocolates” instead.

“This year, they will have a lot of money falling out their ears,” he said. “Think about it,” he added, “where do you think the Kenyan cattle keepers’ vote is going to go in future?” Happy 2021.

The author is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3