Abimbo miners shouldn’t have been punished for refusing to wait for government jobs. While everyone is currently busy begging their office accountants to approve their end-of-year party budget, somewhere in Siaya County, families have run out of tears after begging the government to pretend that they care for their loved ones trapped inside a mining shaft for more than two weeks .
Those young men in Abimbo did nothing wrong to go look for work, and they shouldn’t have been punished for refusing to wait for the one million jobs every year they were promised five years ago.
Every day, we wake up to lecture poor people how they’re lazy and are used to relying on politicians for easy handouts, but when they wake up to fend for their families, we convert their offices into human traps and watch them die on prime time television as we argue on whether or not Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang deserves to be stripped of Arsenal’s captaincy.
We have let down the poor of this country and we must take advantage of the birth of Jesus next week to ask his Father for forgiveness because if we don’t, his mother might not allow us to touch her son for fear of infecting him with this deadly Kenyan strain of bad manners.
We’re sending a dangerously wrong message to our young men who have chosen hard work over soft life, at a perilous time when young people are increasingly growing impatient with the government for taking them for granted and treating them like patients in public hospitals. No one leaves the comfort of home to go work in an air-tight manhole deep inside the stomach of the earth knowing their chances of coming out are slimmer than a runway model on diet.
The unnecessary argument, between the national and county governments, on whose role it is to rescue trapped miners should never again be entertained, because people who desperately need help have no time for public participation on whose hands they think they will be safe.
Workplace safety and security
We’ve never had these derailing discussions when children of the rich develop hiccups and need to be flown abroad to have their diaphragms checked.
Kenyans don’t care whose role it is to provide workplace safety and security for those bending backwards to meet food halfway down a menacing tunnel on behalf of their families. All they want is for levers of government to push them out of that sunken mine without their families being asked to empty their tear glands first.
Those who’ve been presenting themselves as champions of the poor would want us to believe that they’re silent on the Abimbo tragedy because their voices have also gone on Christmas break and will only be back when one of them is arrested for eating public money instead of food.
Kenyans are finding it difficult discussing the best ways to equip artisanal miners with modern sophisticated tools which effortlessly picks out the wheat from the chaff, because there exists a group who claims to know best; and who insist that a wheelbarrow is supposed to be our national symbol for technological advancement.
Had those young men been equipped with modern tools and safety equipment to drill precious minerals off the ground, their workplace would’ve been safer and those minerals smiled all the way from bottom-up.
Let’s not reduce the health and safety of poor people to empty sloganeering for political clout. There are many designated places for politicians to hunt for votes, and a collapsed mine isn’t one of them. To be poor might be a crime in Kenya, but we all have to agree it shouldn’t be a death sentence. BY DAILY NATION