Adequate food key to health
According to a report we published at the weekend, more Kenyans are dying, and at a much younger age, than before. It can only mean that, since independence, our productivity has steadily gone down.
In a word, poverty has intensified its deadly grip on us during the last three decades. During the two decades since 1984, of course, our death rate would have been greatly catalysed by Aids.
But let us beware. In the Third World, statesmen are fond of rushing to scapegoats for all their policy failings. Just as, in the Seventies, our Government used to blame all its economic difficulties on "worldwide inflation", the present Government might be tempted to blame everything on Aids.
To do so would be to try to conceal the fact that Aids itself, though capable of attacking members of all classes, has its highest toll among the poor. The question is: Why? The answer: For the simple reason that they are poor.
For poverty is the mother of all the other nooses around the necks of members of the lower classes, including ignorance and disease. The poor are more likely to catch Aids because they are ignorant of preventive measures.
And when they have caught it, they are more likely to die faster because they are too poor to afford the drugs both for managing Aids itself and opportunistic diseases.
The deadliest effect of poverty is not Aids but hunger. First, some of these drugs will not work on an empty stomach. And even if they did, one must perish sooner than later where the stomach remains empty.
Thus to blame on Aids our increasing mortality rate and our decreasing life expectancy is to evade the problem. We can get complete mastery over disease only if we have adequate food supplies.
This presupposes greater and better distributed wealth. But, where our Government seems to prefer to equivocate over wealth production and poverty elimination, how can we avoid more cemeteries nationwide?
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