Brain Waste

Why is Kenya wasting its top brains in hospitals?

Kenya’s top brains - the KCSE ‘As’ and ‘Bs’ scorers are too gifted to be left to lead ordinary lives. Let’s take medical doctors as an example. These are top brains who scored ‘As’ to be allowed to study medicine. Yet these are the same people striking on almost a regular basis and demanding better pay. They are at the mercy of bureaucrats who may have not performed as well academically but who decide how much medical personnel should be paid and which resources should be put at their disposal.

Who allocates resources?

As a country, we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and reassess where we are wasting our top brains.  Shouldn’t the ‘A’ holders be the ones at Afya House deciding which drugs should be bought and how to ensure they reach the doctor in far-flung Moyale -  hundreds of kilometres away from Afya House?

Hospitals without facilities

Why should we train doctors and send them to work in hospitals where there are no facilities and no drugs, thus turning them into mere vegetables, yet we know they are our top brains? Shouldn’t we train them to take up managerial positions, policy making positions, decision-making positions? Shouldn’t we give them more clout?

Brain drain

Kenyan doctors and nurses are highly mobile. A good number fly out of the country to seek greener pastures elsewhere. Why train doctors for other countries who pay them better?  Can’t we also pay doctors well and attract expatriate ones so that we can improve the management function, the policy making function, the resource generation function and then we will be prosperous as a nation?

This way we will be on our way to achieving Vision 2030 that aims at turning this country into a middle-level industrialized country in the footsteps of Malaysia and other Asian Tigers.

Leave routine jobs like medicine to average students

Routine jobs like medicine should be taken up by the ‘C’ graders while politics should be left to those with the rest of the grades – the ‘C’ minuses and below.

Lest we forget, parliamentary representatives are some of the most highly paid people on this land (and this for spending more time bickering in public – not debating issues of substance -, absent from parliamentary sessions and away from their electorate).

So, why isn’t political leadership the magnet it is supposed to be to young people?