By Mbugua Ng’ang’a
It is unconscionable, in my view, for nurses in public hospitals and health centres to withhold their services for 43 days in a row in a country where the line between bare survival and absolute poverty hangs on the balance of whether one will receive a call about an illness in their family.
True, nurses, like all workers, are entitled to fair working conditions, just remuneration and clear career growth pathways. That, for sure, goes without saying. The problem arises when they stay away from their work stations for such prolonged periods, leaving emergency services paralysed, abandoning pregnant mothers at their hour of most critical need, and turning a blind eye to the suffering of patients, especially the vast majority who cannot afford private healthcare.
I have argued in the past, and will do so again, that there are more humane ways of striking, the most ideal, in my view, being intermittent stoppage of work to pile pressure on the employer to fulfill their end of the labour agreement. This is standard practice in most European nations and it is time unions in Kenya borrowed a leaf from them if we are to elevate the quality of labour relations and ensure the dignity of patients even as we put the government and counties to task over their role in appreciating the dignity of labour.
In August alone, according to The Standard, 63 women died while giving birth while 69 babies died immediately after they were born. Another 390 died before they were born. In all 522 deaths were reported. These were men, women and children who were meant to be hale and hearty today. Yet they died prematurely because nurses withdrew their services in toto when they had a more modern — not to mention humane — way of achieving their goals but chose not to use it. It is painful. And not just because the primary job of health professionals is to save lives.
Regrettably, successive governments in Kenya have created a bad tradition of not acting until, and unless, citizens with grievances become ungovernable before interventions can be put in place. That intransigence is, to a great extent, to blame for the predicament that the nurses found themselves in. Neither the Ministry of Health, nor the county governments that have hired the nurses, thought it wise to take early remedial and proactive action to end the strike. It had to take the intervention of the President for the parties to finally sit together and resolve the deadlock that had paralysed healthcare services for 43 long days of anguish.
Is it that the people charged with the responsibility of ensuring health services run smoothly simply do not care about the plight of patients and nurses? Is it that they are too jaded by their personal pursuits to pause and ask themselves how they can be part of the solution rather than the problem? Or is it simply that when it comes to appreciating their role in public health they simply don’t get it and are more content pushing papers in their gilded offices and looking important in public functions?
These same officials had, in 2017, on their own volition, signed a collective bargaining agreement with the Kenya National Union of Nurses and Midwives, detailing how nurses were to be remunerated, promoted and better facilitated to their job.
In their hearts and minds, however, they knew that they were not committed to implementing the agreement. They thought they would take nurses for a ride, get them to sign a meaningless document and return to the same struggles they had complained about. A year later, the nurses had little choice but to speak the language that the government understands best: Become ungovernable.
These officials, just as the nurses who blocked their eyes to the suffering, and their ears to the wails of patients have the blood of the dearly departed on their hands. Through their sins of omission, they precipitated a crisis that could have been avoided had they implemented the agreement they themselves midwifed and signed. To add insult to the injuries suffered by the families that lost their loved ones, these same officials will continue enjoying government largesse without consequence.
And this, in my view, sits at the core of what ails Kenya: Public officials who literally get away with murder, not because the law is weak, not because they are untouchable, but because they have created a system in which lethargy is not only rewarded but treated as the currency of day-to-day operations in public offices.
mbugua@nairobilawmonthly.com
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