Your bandage solutions will never bring back the dead
The sun is shining mercilessly. If you look long enough, you can see the heat waves that have laid the land bare. Only the hardiest plants survive in this hostile environment.
Young men do brisk trade fetching water from the river on their bicycles, but it is a business carried out only at dawn or dusk, when it is cool enough to ride with a heavy load. I am pondering how anyone can make a living in these conditions when the calm of the afternoon is split by wailing.
Someone has died on the other side of the dusty road. It turns out that it is a 16-year-old who bears the same name as mine. We were both named after the same aunt. She had apparently been in labour for two straight days, and had finally given birth to a beautiful boy.
But something went wrong with the placenta and the traditional midwife was unable to deal with it. Baby had survived, but mother bled to death on day three.
Unable to deal with an outpouring of emotions so soon upon arrival, I make my way down to my cousin’s home a day later. Her head on my shoulder, she weeps silently.
In a moment of bitterness, the bereaved mother bursts out: “My daughter has probably died over a very small thing, very small.”
I am thinking the same thing, but my frustration takes a different direction. The district hospital is nearly 40 kilometres away, a distance not too great if you have the means to get to the nearest bus-stop eight kilometres away.
Only a few years ago, I attended a ceremony to open an emergency theatre at that hospital. The first patient had been a disabled woman who had delivered a bouncing boy to great cheer. Why were we still losing women to childbirth, I wondered aloud, and so needlessly too?
There is no public transport on this stretch of the road and, at any rate, childbirth is not treated as a big production in these parts. Women pop out babies and go to the farm days later. It is that or face a poor harvest and the risk of starvation.
But my cousin has more to say on the matter. “You see that woman in the blue skirt,” she continues. “That’s my husband’s new wife.”
She’s been married before and has 10 children, but he’s set up home with her in a distant fishing community. Ever since they got together, my cousin’s husband rarely comes home. It is as if she and her children have ceased to exist. Ah, well, they do say that love is blind — even to parental responsibility.
DAD AND THE NEW LOVE OF HIS LIFE are bustling about, but my cousin is anything but impressed. “When children live in such difficult circumstances,” my cousin continues, “it is so easy for them to go astray.”
There is a new brand of perfumed oil, I learn later, that is all the rage among teenaged girls here. In hoity-toity society, men woo women with flowers. Here, a bottle of cheap oil will do. Or a loaf of bread. Or a pair of jeans.
My cousin cannot stop fretting. She goes over and over her troubles since the arrival of her older co-wife.
Losing her first-born is painful beyond measure. We expect our children to bury us, not the other way round. She is looking for answers that none of us is able to give. There are many perhaps and what-ifs, and there is little we can do but to hold her hand in sympathy.
I am no good at mathematics, especially where a formula is involved, but I feel the bile rising in my throat as I look at the tally of corruption statistics when I finally return to the capital city. There is plenty of money in this country, it seems. It is just in the hands of too few. And those few are never satisfied.
There is Sh7.6 billion likely to be lost in an oil deal at the Kenya Pipeline Company. Another Sh825 million is being touted as the value of fraud in the maize millers saga. Parastatal chiefs are tumbling like bottle tops over deals to do with figures with so many zeroes after them that it’s hard to imagine the money involved.
It is a good thing that suspects in many of these cases are being held to account. But it is not enough that a handful of parastatal heads should be sent packing. Those found guilty of misusing public funds should be made to pay it back, besides being locked up.
It cannot be that easy to hide the billions that have been stashed away over the years, and moaning about it should not be allowed to be good enough.
My niece died needlessly, and her son has since followed her to the grave. Millions others starve in a land where billions leech from Government coffers. Our leaders opt for bandage solutions to problems that demand strategic thinking and sustained investment. Is anyone up there listening?
