Then corona happened...

The first week of March had seen China build a mega hospital in two weeks. Very excellent for a 2020 man. Corona would be declared pandemic weeks later, the World Health Organization behaving like another understaffed, underfunded and dependent organization. The USA president took weeks, deaths having long troubled Italy and Spain and threatening people in New York to condemn the body of unpreparedness, misuse of funds and favouring China.

Kenya is good in copy pasting western ways of action just as a child puts his leg in his father’s shoes. Schools were closed with the report of the primary patient from Rongai. And the students boarded vehicles homewards. A mega harm if you asked me. Who had taken Corona to schools? Aren’t schools the safest zones we have? Teachers who come in and leave would have been the ones controlled and visitations checked. We exhibited erraticism that we are good at when we closed schools.

Without forgetting that on March 8^th there was one mega sporty event at Kasarani stadium. Gor Mahia played AFC Leopards, fans always at pomp. A match that was well attended with the best of the middle class – politicians. People who like travelling in and outside the country, a time that the airports were still open. The public asked the government to stop the flights but Serikali ni nani...?

Forgetting the stereotypes that started being shared left right and center with the social media being what it is yet to wean itself from – an abused child. Africans are black, that thing is for white skins. Africa is too hot for the fat layer of that virus. Then 5G network as a causing factor of Corona. End time psychos never sleep, or such speculation is good for them and the curious, people who haven’t read more than ten serious books. Africa hasn’t reported a case! Before Tunisia and Morocco. Before South Africa…

The government, hardly it being a people’s, people have to brood and spread fear on the steps going to be taken. A lockdown, a curfew, a what? The people who suffer most being the poor and the ones hooked to such people or media that speak to them. A professor in hand washing did trend. And sanitisers got a name to many. Local linguas struggled to give it a name, and the mask. What is the name of a mask in your mother-tongue again? And what is the work of a mask really?

Virologists needed to be the new social and community health workers but their English was mainly for TV. We are speaking of Wanjiku here. The poor woman and youth in Vihiga County. What are viruses? How are viruses spread? Who got the virus? And when a man from Siaya was thrown in a grave at night as it was with the very first HIV/Aids victims, then the villages were shook further. What was really happening? Put on a mask, put on a mask, the uninformed obedient government men and women cried.

Police enforced curfews that started at 7.00pm by beatings and killings. A day after the violence had surpassed the number of tested positive cases. When a police kicks you in the stomach, when he hits you with all his might, is it not the President indirectly hitting you? And the police were rarely seen with masks on. Funny. Activists joined the night insect buzz – sanitize, put on a mask and keep distance. Ask them why and they would have told you that Corona is a disease that is not harmful to a majority, but unlike HIV that makes the body weak, it is a virus that capitalizes on weak immunity as of the aged.

Nairobi and Mombasa towns would have occupants barred from travelling out. Kilifi too. Whereas the government was testing not more than a handful a day. The idea was that in 14 days there would be so many deaths that the people in those places would burry themselves. Yes, Corona had a 14 day killer period and many people bought into this. I wished I was near my girlfriend. I’d have proposed.

A Nigerian posted a doubt clip. We hear of rising cases daily. But who are these found positive? What are their names? Where do they come from? And we also hear of one or two daily deaths. What were the health conditions of those people? As people are born daily, so are they not expected to die daily? And that takes us straight to funding that the government has been able to receive to fight Covid 19. Monies used to facilitate activities of awareness and others – they know best. Not for any tangible results. For if Corona wanted to make us know we are stupid it wouldn’t need much energies. Free ventilators were less than 20 in the whole republic by the dawn of April 2020.

Yes, pandemics are serious. But Corona was a scam of our time – the way we reacted to it as individuals, societies and nations.

The Tanzanian President John Magufuli surprised the world when he said that random petrol, goat, pineapple and pawpaw samples were taken to the labs, incognito to the lab technicians. The kits imported read the pawpaw as positive. Yes, the kits imported. And Tanzania wasted little time putting curfews in place and boarder lockdowns as Uganda had done with knowledge that a third world government has no way it can feed its locked citizens! An economy on its knees is hard to revive if it sinks further. He in the very mind told his nation that a plane had gone to Madagasar to collect Artemisia. The President of Madagascar would later condemn heavily World Health Body as of the west, for it did not want to show interest if indeed Artemisia was efficient or lacking … but the run for a vaccine.

Art by Masoud Kipanya - Tz