YVONNE'S TAKE: Kiambu - Between life and death

Health is not politics and death is not a debate. Yet in Kiambu County, leaders are busy arguing over numbers, while babies die.

For more than 130 days now, doctors in Kiambu County have been on strike — that’s over four months of strained hospitals, absent care, and mothers turned away when they need help the most. During that time, newborns have died.

On Citizen TV this week, two women told their stories — one whose baby died hours after birth because there was no doctor available, and another whose premature infant struggled for life while her mother was told to personally watch over her baby in the neonatal ICU because there were no doctors to do it.

No one weeps like that for no reason.

But the county government insists all is well.

The governor and his health executive deny any crisis. They even dispute the number of deaths. Oh, it’s not 156, or 136, or whatever figure others have quoted. We have reduced a serious matter of death to splitting hairs and quibbling over numbers.

So, governor, what is the right number? How many babies must die before you call this a crisis? Governor Wamatangi, what is the acceptable threshold of death in your county? Because even one is one too many.

When you argue over figures, you miss the point entirely. You don’t get to inflate or deflate grief to suit a political narrative. You don’t measure tragedy by arithmetic.

Meanwhile, neighbouring Murang’a County and Kenyatta National Hospital are overwhelmed by patients fleeing Kiambu’s paralysis. If services are truly uninterrupted, why are women in labour crossing county lines just to find a doctor?

This denial, this stubbornness, is not leadership. It’s negligence, dressed up as public relations.

You don’t fix a health crisis with press conferences at “State of the County” events. You fix it by sitting down with doctors.
By listening. By negotiating in good faith.

Because at the end of the day, this is not just about doctors and salaries — it’s also about patients.
It’s about a mother in pain, a baby who can’t breathe, a family who loses faith in a system meant to protect them.

Governor Wamatangi, your people are dying — not from lack of medicine, but from a lack of humility. Somewhere along the way, politics and numbers became more important to you than the lives of your people. And that is the real crisis in Kiambu.