Response to new disease falls below expectations

Ideas & Debate

Response to new disease falls below expectations

Thursday, April 23, 2020 21:57

By DENNIS KABAARA

He didn’t attend critical meetings of the strategic emergency response group. He doesn’t work on weekends. He was pretty relaxed about coronavirus, and lacked urgency in planning for the impending crisis. Meanwhile, his counterpart dismissed coronavirus as a hoax, before pivoting towards “always knowing it was a pandemic.” He is itching to reopen the economy; he wanted it by Easter, then by May 1; now he’s issued a three-phase federal guideline that state governors might or might not follow.

The first leader is UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson; the claims come from the Sunday Times. The second is US President and TV star Donald Trump, amid scenes of demonstrations reminiscent of “The Walking Dead.” By press accounts, both leaders dismissed the science, and the inevitable comparison has been made with Germany’s quantum chemist Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the effectiveness of Germany’s response to the pandemic. In a world constantly on the lookout for stars – read lockdown Taiwan and New Zealand or no-lockdown South Korea, this virus is the great equaliser.

When we’re done with the second and/or third waves of the pandemic sometime in 2021, we should be in a position to establish a leadership/governance league table which points us to Leaders Zero, Nero and Hero. Leader Zero will have kept it “business as usual,” Leader Nero will have “fiddled as the country burnt” (and paid musicians for it) and Leader Hero will be, well, the hero.

This is a box office hit in the making. Cue Spielberg, Tarantino, Nolan, Bigelow, Scorcese, Fincher, et al.

Back on Planet Kenya, our “shelter-in-place” life continues. A casual observation of Twitter debate confirms that cabin fever is setting in. Social media is full of horror stories about quarantine “prisons” and police beatings to enforce curfews. Apparently that minimum Sh28,000 charge for a 14-day confinement is now the latest bribery cash cow for police officers as they nab lockdown miscreants.

Officially there is denial, and we continue to be inundated with daily data and lectures galore. Meanwhile, mass testing is always going to start next week, where next week is next week, or never – which one is it?

So it’s worth looking again at the “governance” of this pandemic, and the information gap that is being filled by fake news. Nature abhors a vacuum, and our information one is big.

You will recall the five committees I mentioned last week, which a section of the press clarified as two committees and three working groups.Twenty out of 21 cabinet secretaries (Labour is the exception) and 16 out of 44 principal secretaries sit on these committees/working groups. So do our national security leaders – in the army, intelligence and police.

Total membership (including double counting since some cabinet secretaries — Treasury, Transport, Agriculture, Health, Defence, Foreign Affairs and ICT — sit on more than one committee/working group) is 75. Don’t forget the Covid-19 Emergency Fund. And this week’s ICT Committee on Covid-19.

If practically the entire cabinet has been redeployed, we have a coronavirus government - an interesting question for the state of other government work.

Let’s throw a couple of questions at these committees/working groups. Starting with the National Emergency Response Committee on Coronavirus (call this the Health group). What is the actual position on targeted, mass or targeted mass testing? What is the response to the dire state of quarantine facilities, which sound like great loci for virus spread? What is the state of deployment of personal protective equipment (PPEs) and other tools and equipment across the country? Ditto trained and equipped personnel.

Jump across to the National Economic and Business Response Working Group. Earlier this week, the Treasury Cabinet Secretary wrote in the Business Daily that the economy would contract by an astonishing 50 per cent, taking us right back to 2012 and pre-Jubilee Kenya. To put this in perspective, Moody’s, the rating agency, expects South Africa, a stuttering economy, to contract by 2.5 per cent. How have we spent Sh40 billion in the first 40 days of this pandemic?

Another question. We’ve seen a range of mini-measures to cushion parts of the economy and society. But, where’s the economic stabilisation strategy to carry us through this pandemic before we start plotting a post-pandemic economic recovery and rebound? A difficult one, but early indications help.

To the Security Preparedness and Response Working Group, has anyone considered the use of “nudge” rather than “shove” as a strategy? There surely must be a way to provide behavioural signalling that supports government directives beyond the policeman’s “rungu” (baton) and “nyahunyo” (whip/sjambok) and “dumbed down” advertorials in our media.

Finally, the County Coordination and Food Supply Working Group. Ok, “supply” is the current concern, and it would be nice to understand the current “state of food availability”, but, in addition, what initiatives are being pursued to equally focus on actual “production”?

Mostly, where do we know that are we winning, and where do we know that we need to do better? What are the “known knowns” and the “known unknowns” we are dealing with? Forget the National Co-ordination super-committee for now. Let’s start with fuller briefings from our leadership that speak openly to these questions with inspiring answers of truth. Leader Hero, anyone?