Ever since President Uhuru Kenyatta took the stage and announced that 5 counties will be put under lockdown on March 26th 2021m and it was deemed effective on midnight and above that the curfew hours of the aforementioned counties also changed from 10 pm-4 am to 8 pm-4 am. I have been wanting to write on the matter and what it meant to the country but my guts told me to wait and watch, see how the people react. I was not wrong. This presidential announcement was met with a lot of anger, disappointment and frustration by Kenyans on the internet and the most vocal, KOT.
Since then, the #UnlockOurCountry has been dominating Twitter with people demanding and calling for the opening of our country for the common mwanainchi to hustle and feed their families. This has in turn boiled over to activists leading a peaceful protest in and around Nairobi, which has been meted with unlawful arrests to distract the Kenyan public, only time will tell how successful those underhanded tactics work.
Disclaimer: Before you continue you should understand that I am not a politician or a lawyer or anyone that matters. I am a blogger with opinions, a storyteller chasing a hit piece but most importantly I’m a Kenyan citizen born and raised and I share in the laments of my fellow Kenyans in their quest for justice and good/sober governance. With that said, let’s go on.
After careful consideration and assessment of the situation
at hand, I cannot help but think how right and at the same time wrong the people
demanding justice and the opening of our country are. Here is why. Indeed, the locking down of the 5 counties was probably uncalled for but the
rest of the country is still open and functional under the same guidelines set
last year.
There is no right or wrong way to look at the situation and after following this debate for those two weeks there is no solid argument to make that doesn’t crumble right in our faces. We are asking for the opening of our country yet in totality the country has only managed to conduct 1,549,388 cumulative tests and with a total of 144,154 cases being positive. In a country with 47 million+ citizens what we should be most concerned about and what the citizens should be fighting for is the availability of affordable, rapid and efficient testing which will provide us the people and the government with the numbers on how to the vaccine rollout process is handled, but with 340, 000+ vaccines given, there is no data on the number of people who have gotten the doses(M.O.H numbers are 422,021 as of 8th April 2021) and on top of that news of people who have negatively reacted to the vaccine are growing on a daily basis. On top of it all with the current rate of testing going on with an estimated 4245 people per day, to test everyone in the country as per the 2019 census, would take approximately 30 and a half years. And if M.O.H vaccination numbers, it would mean an estimated 26736 people are being vaccinated daily and that would mean 4.9 years for everyone in the country as per the 2019 census to have gotten their first vaccine dose.
We are putting pressure on the government to work on what at
this moment is the least important thing, opening our country. They will not
respond. And calling for people to take on the streets and putting their lives
in danger for what at the moment should be the least of our concern, is not
helping anybody. Our government is not best known for upholding basic rights
let alone Article 19. Peaceful demonstrations have been known to end in
bloodshed and no one will fight for the justice of the fallen.
#UnlockOurCountry is a beautiful lie we have told ourselves to convince us that our voice will be heard, yet that is exactly what the government wants you to do, make noise and have you blinded by the fact that they are yet to do anything significant on the Covid-19 matter. Testing 1 million people in a year with a country of 47 times that is not a milestone and it is not significant and that is where our energy should be focused on, pushing the government for efficient, affordable, available and reliable Covid-19 tests countrywide if not, the next government will come in to find the same mess and due to the collective debt immersed by the current government, a shitload to clean up.
It is my belief the government expected this reaction from the people and I would go even further to say it was anticipated. And I believe that if the people were to put pressure on the government on matters that will go on to affect our country and its future generations, things like the trillions in debts incurred and the shoddy handling of the Coronavirus pandemic in the country, then and only then will our country be truly unlocked. The future of our country is decided by what we decide to fight for today.
#UnlockOurCountry.
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