Murang’a Governor Mwangi wa Iria has been boasting that he is building a fully working intensive care unit at the county level five hospital from scratch – in 21 days flat.
On his Twitter page, he gives daily updates of the progress the construction work is making, and the days remaining to his self-imposed deadline. He also dutifully posts photos of the ongoing construction work.
There’s considerable scepticism the governor will complete the facility on time. Yet he remains bullish.
“The person saying it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it,” he tweeted last week. For good measure, he says the facility, with 35 beds, will be the biggest in the Mt Kenya region.
He refers to it as state-of-the-art. Well, we can only wait to see the finished work. As of today, Wa Iria has about a week left to complete his structure within the timeline he has given himself.
The governor is jumping late into this construction frenzy because Murang’a is woefully short of ICU facilities. This rush has been driven by the Covid-19 pandemic.
A recent survey indicated that the existing ICU amenities in the county were mostly in private hospitals. Of course an ICU facility is much more than a building.
There has to be specialist medical staff and intensive care equipment, which is quite expensive. The governor says they are sponsoring specialist training for 20 nurses who will work in the ICU wards.
However, he is silent on the doctors to be seconded there. He is also mum on the budget for the equipment. An empty structure that is not equipped will make him the laughing stock of the county.
I am all for an ICU facility to improve Murang’a’s health infrastructure and prepare it in case the Covid-19 pandemic spills over to the county.
My beef with the county government is the dereliction in setting it up well before the corona problem arose.
Wa Iria’s devolution philosophy, which he touts frequently, is to push for the “deliverables” that he says will increase incomes for households.
By this he means providing stuff like coffee and grain seedlings to farmers, and fertilisers and other inputs. He has been particularly focused on two things: dairy and avocado farming.
He has built a multimillion-shilling milk processing plant which indeed other county leaders come to benchmark on.
Wa Iria’s background in the milk industry – he is a former CEO with Kenya Cooperative Creameries – explains this obsession. His mania for avocado farming also seems to have paid off.
The avocado is now counted as the most profitable farm product from Murang’a county.
Wa Iria’s approach may sound good, but it can be faulted in several aspects. It doesn’t align priorities in such a manner that every likely eventuality is taken into consideration.
Take the corona scare for instance. In any case the lack of a sound healthcare system in the county eats into the same incomes he is proud of when sick residents are forced to seek treatment in private hospitals.
Farm deliverables are okay, but so are legacy projects like hospitals and processing factories for farm produce. The governor is still to deliver on a speciality tea factory he promised to build at Kenol town.
Also rarely heard of these days is an industrial park he once promoted on 3,000 acres of land he was pursuing from the Del Monte pineapple plantation. (The last I heard the matter was in court).
It is common knowledge that the health sector in Kenya as a whole is in shambles. We don’t have enough hospitals, dispensaries, doctors, clinical officers and nurses.
Public hospitals are in pathetic and poorly equipped state. Drugs are not there and patients have to buy from private pharmacies.
It is a matter of great embarrassment that Kenyans who can afford it make a beeline to foreign countries when they fall sick, India being a popular destination.
Others expend a lot of energy fundraising from friends and relatives to get the kind of medical care overseas they can’t get locally, in the process exhausting their personal savings.
If there will be a silver lining from this unpleasant corona pandemic, it will come through forcing the authorities to relook comprehensively the state of healthcare in this country.
If this Covid-19 disease really gets out of hand, we’ll face a calamity of proportions we have not seen before. Supplies of personal protection gear for our health workers have been a challenge.
There are reports that Toyota Kenya will manufacture some ventilators, which are a key component of intensive corona care, but no idea when and how many. I wonder whether Wa Iria has secured any.
