The government, through the Ministry of Health, has embarked on what, at face value, looks like a commendable strategy to equip county hospitals so they can provide health solutions conveniently and cost-effectively.
The programme, during the Uhuru Kenyatta administration, was known as the Medical Equipment Service plan.
The good intentions of the programme would in the end be exposed as nothing more than a channel to enrich well-heeled and politically connected individuals and fleece counties because the leasing costs were highly exorbitant and the needs of the counties were never factored.
A Senate committee would in the end publish a damning report.
It seems health is an extremely pliable target because one year after getting to power, the Kenya Kwanza administration embarked on yet another leased equipment deal rechristened National Equipment Support Programme.
Our bureaucrats must for sure know that accountability is a fact of life in a democracy. Governors have since 2023 complained they were never consulted and they do not even know the sums they are supposed to cough up for the equipment and, worse, they have no contract with the suppliers.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it just may be a duck.
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Quote of the day:
“Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?” —American author and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902.
