In Kenya to be medical doctor is no longer such a big deal. Kenyans are known to hold great esteem for and ardently idolize education, but achieving the distinction of MD has lost its lustre . Not so much because everybody on the streets of Nairobi is a medical doctor but because the meanly paid physicians have been ruthlessly ground down from their past towering heights with deplorable remuneration.
Their implacable employer, the Kenyan government seems to have made the astounding achievement of realizing the socialist dream of equality in a capitalist market economy -- although with a minor twist. All professional classes have been neglected and frustrated to the point of being more or less equally miserable and discontent. By virtually starving doctors, the government has thrust the stature of the men and women of the medical profession to levels no higher than that of the average hungry idler.
Which brings to mind the question, if a doctor in this country cannot afford a descent meal, or be able to pay his rent and transport costs where are we going as a nation? A second-hand clothes stall owner at Gikomba often takes home at the end of the month more than what an average doctor earns. What really are we saying? That it is no longer worthwhile to be a skilled professional in this country?
Given the track record of the Kenyan government the answer to the last question would probably be yes. Within the geographical area denoted by the slum conjuring word -- Kenya, it has become imperative for people to raise their goals in life a bit higher.
This means one has to aspire for better paying jobs like being a politician, a preacher, a trader, a speculator of imaginary parcels of land or even a drug dealer. These occupations are the only one's that seem to provide the surest path to financial security and prosperity.To be a farmer is now a euphemism that literally means to be downtrodden or to be inordinately silly. A teacher, much like the manner in which a camel is taken to be the ship of the desert, implies being a generational courier and transmitter of poverty. As for the engineer he is not even needed, quacks run the construction industry in the country.
Keen not to leave behind the most respected professional class and to keep in line with the government's policy of degrading and denigrating professions. The doctors request for better pay has been met with a counter-offer in form of token increments and promises for more which this government has no intention whatsoever of keeping -- they'd rather bribe the doctor's union officials. This as the mostly young doctors are rapidly being reduced to paupers while senior bureaucrats and MPs get to raid the national coffers at will and raise their incomes and allowances at their own pleasure.
Only the other day, the MPs hijacked the Contingency Fund which is meant for national emergencies, with the urgent and wholesome reason of catering for the honourable members' mortgages -- which have sky rocketed alongside the phenomenal rise in the banks' interest rates. Mind you MPs have utterly refused to pay their taxes, in blatant contravention of the new constitution.
Apparently in the minds of the politicians there was an abrupt break in the calamities Kenya has been facing and their own peculiar prognosis for the remainder of the year showed that we would have no more disasters until the next financial year. Since then the disasters have only increased in number and magnitude -- there is a famine that continues to afflict millions of people, road carnage that is getting out control, the poisoning of a quarter of a million children in northern Kenya by contaminated food provided by unscrupulous businessmen and now the long awaited rains have come with vengeance. The ravaging floods are reducing parts of Kenya to miniature versions of Bangkok.
In the midst of all that the country got an early and unpleasant Christmas present of being drawn into a war (which officially is not a war) that has suddenly put a humongous hole in the cash books at treasury.The MPs remain mum about the disaster money they gobbled up, and it is unlikely that the idea of refunding any or all of the money the brazenly hijacked from the Contingency Fund has even crossed their minds.
True to form though, the super special club of hypocrites called the augsut House or simply Parliament, has had its members at the forefront of the clamour for the government to do something in aid of the disaster affected Kenyans. They have been shrieking the loudest that the government is not doing enough as the country is facing the worst floods since the El Nino ones fourteen years ago. This despite the fact that they themselves are the culprits who have left the government broke and ill equipped to deal with those emergencies . Incidentally the floods have come in quick succession to the worst drought in sixty years and right after the MPs callously increased their mortgages. "Bad, bad MP. But teeribo, teeribo karma," says my imaginary zen master -- Master Wu "poritician shouldu neber touch contingency kitty!"
In the issue of the doctor's pay, the government can start by asking the MPs to pay their taxes and to return the money they raided from the Contigency Fund if it is really cash-strapped as it claims. I think the issue of the doctors' salaries is more of a national emergency than the MPs mortgages can ever be. Kenyans are not yet that evolved -- or patient enough -- to mend fractures and perform internal surgeries with pure meditation.
M. Wycliff,
Nairobi.
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