I recently went off-grid for a few days because I started to feel like social distancing was taking its toll. In Kenya, we’ve been in some form of Covid-19 lockdown since March: separated from friends and family, watching the government make a hash of the public-health crisis. Even though the numbers on paper tell a positive story, we know that this administration has a tendency to misrepresent facts for political gain, for example under-testing to report low overall numbers.
This is the sobering reality that many people around the world are dealing with today as governments fumble with pandemic responses. I think it is partly why so many of us are feeling tired. There’s no shared responsibility; the citizen is doing the work of both the governing and the governed. The saying goes, ‘when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’. Well, governments around the world, rooted in militarized patriarchy, are finding that all they know is how to start wars and they will not divert enough energy away from that space to give the current crisis the attention it needs. At the beginning of 2017, the Government of Kenya bought 12 fighter jets, two trainer aircraft and weapons from the US for $418 million. Still, we only have about 500 intensive care unit beds for a national population of 47 million and they cannot find the funds to pay doctors and nurses enough to stop them from going on strike.
