‘It’s the economy, stupid!” was the epochal catch phrase for Bill Clinton’s 1992 United States presidential campaign against President George H.W. Bush. The expression was conceived by James Carville, one of Clinton’s campaign strategists and was hung up as a sign at the campaign headquarters as part of the key messages that the campaign team would harp against Bush’s performance in his first and only term as president, a term that had been marked by an economic recession.
The looming Covid-19-instigated global recession, with far-reaching implications for our own emerging Kenyan economy, provides a dastardly moral conundrum for governments today. From decisions about total versus partial lockdowns to decisions about which sectors of the economy should be opened by when are hard decisions to make as the consequences are debilitating to both human health as well as human economic well being concurrently.
