The government had promised free primary education for all citizens. Perhaps with the promise of laptops to every Kenyan pupil, masses rallied behind the Jubilee administration.
Laptop for each pupil was an idea that would have saved us now
Laptops for each pupil was faced with a lot of ridicule from the opposing camp terming it over ambitious and impractical in a country whose larger population lives below a dollar a day. The opposition had nothing better to offer, I couldn’t frame it otherwise.
In 2020, no laptops for pupils despite billions of shillings being allocated for the project. Leave alone other promises like stadia in each our major cities. Today, school has been forced to go digital. Children have been forced to stay indoors and watch TV, a tradition that had been discouraged by many due to the unfriendly nature of the our TV content to children.
The bitter pill is, had the government considered its own campaign tool of a laptop for each pupil, the country would been worrying about children covering the syllabus and sitting national exams in time.
Health care system is weak and overstretched
The health sector is stretched at the moment. More hospitals need more staff as the pandemic takes a toll on the available resources. The county government of machakos for instance, has had to convert a football pitch into a temporary isolation centre for patients who test positive for novel covid-19.
As the cases in Kenya continue to grow by the day, according to estimates, we are likely to see more and more people isolated as part of measures to curb the spread of the virus. Nairobi, currently on lock down being the epicentre in Kenya, more people are testing positive from quarantine facilities.
One of the jubilee government big four agenda was healthcare, and we see a clear crisis at the moment in hospitals as resources shift towards management of the virus. Caring for other normal diseases has been shunned for a moment and one of the giant scholars in Kenya died recently at Kenyatta national hospital because there were no doctors to attend to him after being involved in an accident in Nairobi.
Kenyan police kills innocent people while enforcing a curfew
The national police service was on the spot after a police officer shot a teenager in Nairobi. GSU officers manning Likoni ferry in Mombasa beat up people who were trying to beat curfew deadline.
Its a failure of the part of planning as workers were released from their jobs one or two hours to curfew time. A clear guideline on how people would reach their houses in time should have been put in place and those in charge of enforcing the curfew should have known that challenge of likoni crossing.
We have well thought out mechanisms of dealing with COVID -19 pandemic. Our institutions have done the handful of their responsibility to ensure that the infection curve is flattened as much as possible if we have to survive the passed this pandemic, a reevaluation of our institutions has to be made. Let the country seal the loopholes that have clearly manifested in this pandemic for a better-prepared nation in the future.
