If we get education and healthcare wrong, we die twice - poor and stupid

There are two things a nation cannot afford to gamble with: education and healthcare. These are not luxuries. They are the pillars of a society that wants to exist, thrive, and be respected in the world. Yet in Kenya today, the two are treated as bargaining chips in political poker games, traded between boardrooms and press conferences, while the common mwananchi watches dreams evaporate.

Every few months, doctors are on the streets, again. They are not demanding heaven; they are simply demanding what was promised. Salaries. Better facilities. Decent working conditions. When one demand is met, another is left to rot. And the vicious cycle repeats. Private hospitals now threaten to shun SHA cards, demanding cash instead.

Can we blame them? When a mwananchi pays their health coverage faithfully through SHA, only for hospitals to wait months on end for reimbursements, something is wrong. The very system meant to shield the poor from catastrophic medical bills is now pushing them into bankruptcy or premature graves.

And what of education? Universities closing indefinitely, students stranded, lecturers unpaid, and a funding model that confuses more than it convinces. The so-called “new model” looks designed to choke the poor while the elite, whose children study abroad, look on with indifference. Education in Kenya has become a privilege instead of a right, an arena where the poor wrestle with broken dreams while the rich buy international certificates with ease.

Let’s be clear, when education collapses, we kill dreams before they are born. When healthcare collapses, we bury bodies that should still be alive.

What makes it worse is the hypocrisy. Leaders entrusted with our resources draw fat salaries and allowances, fly their families abroad for specialized treatment, and send their children to foreign universities. No matter how broken our hospitals are, no matter how dead our universities look, it never bothers them. Why? Because their lives are insured against our suffering.

But for the mwananchi, this is life and death. If you cannot afford healthcare, you die. If you cannot afford education, you die standing, slowly, painfully, as opportunities pass you by. And both deaths are avoidable if only leaders cared.

It is high time Kenyans understood that education and health are not favors given by politicians; they are rights. They are the heartbeat of national survival. Without them, we are a nation of sickly, uninformed people, easy to manipulate, easy to exploit, easy to silence.

We must demand better. We must not allow health and education to be tampered with by greed and incompetence. If we find the two wrong, as it looks like currently, be sure we’ll die stupid. And worse still, our children will inherit that stupidity as a legacy.

By Sebastian Karani Asava