By Msema Ukweli
As a rule of thumb, a cartel in possession of a stolen fortune seeks any reason to create distractions. The Kenya Hospital Association’s current brotherhood of boardroom gold diggers, finding the walls of their makeshift treasury closing in, crafted a fictional inanity so hopeless that only a deranged mind could conjure.
The tale bandied willy-nilly by some dim-witted daydreamer claimed that President William Ruto, the ceremonial Patron of Nairobi Hospital, is secretly scheming to appropriate Nairobi Hospital’s prime acreage. That is the kind of story a petty thief blurts out when caught wrist-deep in a stranger’s handbag.
From the era of Jomo Kenyatta, through Moi, Kibaki, Uhuru Kenyatta, and now Ruto, every Kenyan Head of State has served as the hospital’s Patron. It is a wholly honorific role, a nod to the institution’s standing as a regional jewel of medical care. It is not anything near a backdoor mechanism for land acquisition by anyone, least of all President William Ruto.
The suggestion that a sitting president would orchestrate a clandestine property grab when the entire edifice of the State, from the National Land Commission to the courts, could lawfully acquire land for public purpose with a single gazette notice is as plausible as a hyena delivering a public lecture on vegetarianism. Surely, only a mind marinated in its own mercantile cunning could imagine such a spectre.
What, in the first place, prompted this sudden flood of patriotic solicitude for the hospital’s title deed? The timing, as they say, is instructive. The KHA cartel, having quietly altered the articles of association to neuter the doctors’ professional voice, and having raided cash reserves and, sprung the 2024 General Meeting trap with all the finesse of a bear pit. The cartel now finds itself under the most unwelcome of spotlights for it has all the hallmarks of an evil axis bereft of basic morality.
To try to escape the scrutiny, the Nairobi Hospital Patron, in a move that must have sent cold terror through every tenderpreneur’s spine merely inquired why a facility of Nairobi Hospital standing was beginning to smell like a fish market.
When the shaming of the guilty became imminent, the KHA cartel authored a smear in a typical case of the intellectually bankrupt and the morally desiccated. So when a forensic audit seemed unstoppable a bogeyman was promptly manufactured. That is how the Head of State was portrayed as a man eying Nairobi Hospital land.
Let us admit it. Heartless profiteers who do not care one bit for the welfare of patients are playing with doctors of the Admitting Staff Association. The only land these fortune-seekers care about is the fertile soil of the next procurement contract. As for the beef health insurance providers have with Nairobi Hospital, nothing you may have heard thus far sounds more confounding in the history of Kenya’s healthcare journey!
Na bado! Wait for tomorrow’s dynamite on the thieving Kisii brotherhood at Nairobi Hospital hoping to be shielded by a former Cabinet Secretary for Interior and presidential aspirant who they have conscripted into their filthy scheme already. Pathetic!
Msema Ukweli is a Nairobi-based whistle-blower
