Kenya’s choices are to grow the GDP or tackle population growth
Patients attend a free medical camp. Pressure on the country’s healthcare system is likely to increase in future. Photo/FILE
The Salaries and Remuneration Commission has perhaps the most daunting tasks of all current commissions, partly because it touches on the worker’s sacred reason for going to work: money.
The idea that SRC must somehow reduce the public wage bill for civil servants who already feel they are underpaid is unpalatable to many.
But the daunting task is just the tip of the iceberg of a bigger problem. Extrapolation of the current population growth rates, education data and public health services needed by 2020 reveals frightening statistics.
Many sociologists have cautioned about the potentially explosive mix this portends for our nation. A huge population of healthy, highly educated, poorly paid workers can only lead to social unrest.
As a developing nation the sum of the total GDP going to “free” social services will always be higher than that in developed nations. Healthcare features prominently on this list of free government services because it involves life and death.
However, governments have a limit on the funds that can be apportioned for such services.
Will the revenue collector consistently meet his ever-rising allocated collection target? Fast forwarding just five years away the amount of money he must raise to meet the free maternity and other government subsidised healthcare services is no loose change.
Health economists and doctors at large agree: If we can’t increase our GDP to meet the populations’ needs, the only logical alternative is to reduce the population.
The new counties in particular are geared towards grim futures if the population debate is not headlined in their agenda.
The resources allocated towards halting our rapid population growth are not adequate. The calamity ahead may not be obvious to many but as health workers, the ever ballooning demands on public healthcare are visible to us.
Current population reduction strategies do not seem to be working. In my clinic the average number of unplanned pregnancies is about 10 monthly.
Given that more than 90 per cent of family planning services are offered by lower cadre health workers one can only imagine how many such cases happen.
Vindication of such statistics can be seen in Google’s 2013 Zeitgeist that showed Kenyan’s popular health searches were about abortion. Since a higher number of those in the reproductive age groups are without Internet and thus not part of Google’s statistics, we are a nation in peril.
This debate needs to be reinvigorated and made the topmost priority for all counties. Otherwise in summation of Thomas Malthus famous essay, when the earth and people are at war, the people will lose.
