Our conduct amidst the Covid-19 pandemic is making life unbearable

 

Thanks to Safaricom’s founding CEO Michael Joseph, we know Kenyans have peculiar calling habits which the telecommunications giant has internalised and made good business sense of to rake in super-normal profits.

You could be walking down the road in the heart of Nairobi and a long lost friend calls you on the phone to tell you he has just seen you going down the road, never mind that he or she did not stop to great you!

Aren’t we also obsessed with knowing people’s surnames as a way of telling their tribes? Don’t we wait till the last minute to do things we should have done much earlier such as filing individual tax returns? The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed complacency as another Kenyan trait.

Soon after Kenya recorded the first confirmed case of Covid-19 on March 12, 2020, folks engaged in needless panic-buying of food items, toiletries, face mask and cartons of hand sanitiser “to put aside enough supplies to last months in case of a lockdown.”

We have learnt to wash hands, wear mask and to sanitise our hands, thereby keeping Covid-19 deaths to a minimum figure.

But more than a year later, the third wave is here, the number of new infections is rising, and we have become complacent and forgotten the healthy habits that helped us keep the number of new infections down. All sectors of the economy are paying dearly.

On Thursday, the total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in Kenya had risen to 153,488 following the reporting of 965 new infections.

This week, Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe confirmed that the government has no immediate plans to allow sporting activities to resume.

Kagwe further said that the government was forced to limit sports activities to national teams owing to the indiscipline exhibited by athletes, sports administrators, and fans.

After the government rolled out a Covid-19 immunisation exercise for all sportsmen and women nearly two weeks ago at the Moi International Sports Centre, Kasarani, there was hope that local sports would resume.
Our general conduct in the face of Covid-19 has made life more unbearable for ourselves.

When the government suspended all sports activities on March 26, thousands of athletes, including footballers, volleyballers, rugby and hockey players were left without a source of income. Unlike on March 16 last year when the government suspended local sporting activities for the first time, there has been no Sh30,000 stipend the government gave athletes over three months.

We seem to be doing better with national teams than with clubs. The government has allowed some of Kenya’s national teams preparing for international competitions to train in a bio-secure bubble so that they are not disadvantaged, and the athletes have done well to observe health protocols.

Part of the Kenyan team is training at Kasarani, with the delayed 2020 Olympic Games in mind, and some of our runners are at the same venue training for the 2021 World Relay Championships.

After weeks of training in bio-secure bubble, Kenyan volleyball clubs Kenya Ports Authority and GSU are in Tunis competing in men’s category of the 2021 African Club Championships, while Kenya Pipeline and Kenya Prisons are competing in the women’s tournament.

And on Saturday, the Equator Rally organised by the Kenya Motor Sport Federation got underway in Naivasha, with some 34 cars competing.

Other than being a 2021 Africa Rally Championship event, the Equator Rally is also a dry run for the 2021 World Rally Championship Safari Rally.

Equator Rally will use six competitive stages which will be used by the Safari Rally, and it will give organisers, among them rally marshalls, clerk of the course, time controllers, and safety marshalls, an opportunity to taste the action in Safari Rally conditions.  BY DAILY NATION