Police officers boarding a vehicle after removing a road block at Mathore in Lari, Kiambu. [Wilberforce Okwiri, Standard]
“Time brings all things to pass.” That is what the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus said more than 2,500 years ago. Similarly, Kenyans were hopeful that Time would soon vanquish Covid-19, a crippling disease that was first recorded in the country on March 13, 2020.
But 12 months later, the virus remains undefeated. If anything, it has become even more lethal, turning 2021 into another lost year.
Noting that it will not be until mid-May that the peak of the Third Wave of Covid-19 will flatten, President Kenyatta on Friday announced additional stringent measures aimed at stopping the pandemic on its tracks. Not every Kenyan is happy.
On social media, Kenyans have complained of how political ineptitude has compromised the war against this invincible enemy.
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Vaccination
But as the German-American physicist Albert Einstein noted on being asked why the human mind, having been stretched so far as to discover the structure of the atom, it could not devise the political means to keep the atom from destroying humanity, the scientist said: “It is because politics is more difficult than physics.”
While scientists developed safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines in record time, the Kenyan government dithered the rollout of the vaccination programme thus denying Kenyans an early return to normalcy.
By end of Saturday, less than 100,000 had been inoculated, against a stock of more than a million doses in the country’s storerooms.
But even more annoying for most Kenyans, some who will be forced to go without their daily bread due the new measures, is how a political class that organised huge rallies oblivious of the social distancing rules, can now stand on the moral high ground to implicitly blame them for…