Time we stopped India flights

President Kenyatta visited India and discussed with Prime Minister Narendra Modi a plan to have hospitals from that country set up units in Kenya.

“This is one initiative from the President I would support 101 per cent.

“I would say we take from India entire hospitals—lock stock and barrel—and transplant them in Kenya. Facilities, equipment, doctors, nurses, technicians, and support staff offering on Kenyan soil advanced treatment and care at Indian prices might be just what the doctor ordered.”

It was just over six years ago that this page made the above observation. But Kenyan patients still fly to India, helping to sustain a thriving medical tourism. And as long as the Kenyan healthcare system does not adequately serve the general populace, many will be forced to fly out.

All over the capital city, we see billboards from the leading private hospitals advertising ‘World Class’ treatment, but they don’t tell you that their services are only for the uber-rich. And even for those who can afford them, quality of care and opaque billing methods remain untold scandals.

The general population is condemned to either the dilapidated public hospitals or the mushrooming industry of cheap (in the true sense of the word) private hospitals often no more caring of their clients than the local butcher.

I would be the first to acknowledge that, despite its many failings, the Jubilee regime can count healthcare services as one of its unacknowledged success stories. Hospitals at the county level offer care that would have been unimaginable before the advent of devolution.

Also worth mention are the vast networks of health facilities run by religious orders.

Then there is the growing establishment of medical faculties in universities across the country, which has come with the added benefit of reasonable services at affiliated teaching hospitals.

A recent visit to the Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral & Research Hospital was an eye opener. The place is modern, clean and quietly efficient. Skilled and dedicated staff and rapid acquisition of the most modern equipment by KUTRRH should soon give the elite private hospitals a run for their money.

The hospital might just meet my demand for healthcare at Indian quality and prices on Kenyan soil. But it’s a work in progress.

 Some of the advanced equipment recently launched by President Kenyatta is yet to be fully installed and commissioned.

The new health facility also has to prove that it won’t be captured by the Kenyan curse of sloth and greed.

That is why we still need a revolution in our healthcare, for the Indian exodus will never be the solution for the entire populace.

Benchmarking on the best healthcare systems will, therefore, still be necessary, hence the need to transplant entire Indian facilities here rather than waste money sending officials on those beloved overseas junkets.

Again, it’s one thing to establish public hospitals that boast the latest in advanced medicine, but quite another to entrench working primary healthcare facilities and programmes in every corner of the country. 

Prevention, as we know, is always so much better than the search for a cure.

* * *

Deported political activist and lawyer Miguna Miguna must be allowed to come home. The officials responsible for his illegal 2018 expulsion should swallow their pride, admit they erred and cease all further obstruction to his return.

No doubt, many find Dr Miguna loud, irascible and rude; a fellow who cannot pursue an argument without liberal use of crude insults. However, none of those are crimes in law. Neither was the ‘offence’—the mock swearing-in of Opposition presidential candidate Raila Odinga as ‘the people’s president’—that earned him ‘deportation’.

In any case, Mr Odinga is today supping with his erstwhile arch-rival, President Kenyatta.

Keeping Dr Miguna in enforced exile just adds to the publicity he craves and keeps a spotlight on the regrettable episode of official excess and contempt for the law.

If the authorities won’t clear the way for Dr Miguna to take a triumphal flight home, then he must do the next best thing and come back the same way he left. The ‘panya’ routes that he used to flee the country in 1987 are still open and nobody will ask him for a passport or visa.

Retired Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, who is leading the campaign for Dr Miguna’s return, must still be familiar with the informal border crossings, having been a key organiser of the ‘Underground Railroad’ that in the 1980s helped so many dissidents to flee President Daniel arap Moi’s assassins and torturers.

[email protected]. @MachariaGaitho