Ensure safe passage for food transporters

Please support our food transporters. For, as we move into lockdown in Nairobi, our bodies won't cease functioning. Food remains essential, and the government has rightly classed it so, for the attitude we adopt now towards food supplies will define the outcome of the most difficult calculation in living history.

Nearly every nation, our own included, has decided that preventing Covid-19 from spreading is a high enough priority to merit closing down our economies for 2020. Not every nation has made that same decision – Sweden hasn't.

It is still open, at work, and in business. But most nations on Earth have moved to close schools, workplaces, borders, movement, and much more, in an effort to stop the spread of this newest coronavirus.

In our own case, economists are now estimating the cost will come in at a trillion shillings wiped off our GDP this year, and more still in years to come.

But the sum that no one can know is how many lives we will save by suspending nearly all our activities, versus all the lives we shall lose as a result of that same suspension. For we shall lose lives.

From the moment that our public transport became a shadow, there will have been people who had typhoid or malaria who didn't get the right diagnosis, treatment or medication. The piles of job cuts, the move to half salaries, there will be families without other medical fees who will lose members as a result.

There will be many other causes of death through all this disruption, vital medical supplies or equipment that didn't get flown in with our air cargo at a fraction of its former volume.

Medical appointments that get deferred that would have revealed conditions that were still treatable, but which later won't be.

But the really huge swing factor in whether we save more lives than we surrender is the impact that our ceased activities have on our food supplies.

And, in this, we need clarity. If we emerge from all this still well fed, we may have cause for believing we saved more lives than we sacrificed.

But if we allow our food supplies to dwindle, the numbers get to be very ugly and far worse that three percent to 15 percent of our population compromised.

Which means we need our eye on food as we stop so very many activities and movements.

Yet, I have seen Tweets from our most famous saying they are definitely no longer tending their cabbage patch. But tending our cabbages will not spread coronavirus: and it will create food that we need. Truly, we should all be tending our cabbages right now.

So where has this idea come from that creating food now is anti-patriotic, that transporting it is cheating.

In reality, frantic work has been going on behind the scenes to keep food coming into Nairobi for the millions under lockdown, and getting it to our airport too, to reach other populations also in lockdown.

The Fresh Produce Consortium of Kenya and the Kenya Flower Council have put together a fleet of trucks to transport food and horticultural produce with curfew vehicle passes that have been approved by the Ministry of Trade.

The security services have drawn up lists of this newly authorised lockdown-enabled food fleet, the drivers' IDs and vehicle registrations numbers.

Simultaneously, a helpline (0722 408210) has been set up for farmers to get food collected from their farms, and for city estates to get food delivered directly to their residents.

These are schemes that have taken crazy levels of work. But if we respect these efforts, and value them, and use them, we shall fly out of these darkest of hours with our food chain intact, and with food still getting from farm to table.

In all, there is no place in Kenya to devalue farmers who are still growing their tomatoes, nor drivers who transport those tomatoes to the city. These people stand between you and starvation in coming weeks.

So shame on anyone who denigrates, or whips, or punishes our food transporters as we all follow the rules and stay at home and stay in the city.