Resilience is the capacity to recover from difficulties, its toughness, strength, flexibility, sturdiness, adaptability. The opposite of resilience is fragility, vulnerability, weakness. Does the COVID-19 pandemic remain the crucible for testing our resilience, robustness, vigorousness in our economic social lives at the individual and collective level?
Have our elected leaders from the President, the Senators Governors, MPs, MCA’s exhibited resilience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic or helplessness, whining, precariousness in the face of dwindling and diminishing taxes which they had taken for granted as ever-available as they plunder them, abuse them, waste them with no sense of frugality, prudence.
Yes MPs cannot get CDF funds, Counties cannot get their National Budgetary revenue allocations from the National Treasury, Schools, Universities cannot get budgetary support all because Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukar Yutani is being mean but because Treasury has no money. Repeat no money as the taxpayers’ businesses ravaged by the impact of COVID-19 cannot and do not have monies to pay the taxes?
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resilient, robust economies of India and China are raking in billions in the making of the COVID-19 vaccines the syringes to administer the vaccine the PPEs for health works the health equipment’s required to manage the bulging and increasing COVID-19 patients worldwide.
One enterprise in India is making 4 Million syringes a day? And what of vaccines? So why is Africa a spectator once again and waiting with a begging bowl as resilient, robust economies participate in producing, making the tools, accessories, equipment, devices for fighting the rampant COVID-19 pandemic?
So how resilient, robust are the economies of the Counties of the former Western Province of Kakamega, Bungoma, Busia, Vihiga, and neighboring Trans Nzoia in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and its ramifications. What brainwork, thinking, strategizing, envisioning of a new future are our leaders from the elected to the unelected designing, re-imagining, prototyping so that the region can attain any level of manufacturing however rudimentary? Modernizing its agriculture?
Absent National Budgetary taxpayers infusion can our Counties survive or they will grind to a halt? What a shame a disgrace that as a region we have lost the collective ability to survive on our own resources and counties must beg the National Government for non-existent monies to meet their basic needs and essential health requirements.
How do we create resilience, robustness, self-reliance, economic independence in our counties? So what is India, China, or Indian and Chinese men and women made of that African men and women are not made of what shame does Africa continue to exhibit to the world with no contribution to solving the world’s challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic.
And how then do we instill, nurture, cultivate resilience in our children so that they may be better prepared to navigate, function, and compete in the ever-changing dynamic world where those who are the resilient, robust rise and bloom and prosper. Are you and me resilient? What is resilience, robustness adaptability in our cultures? Where has it vanished to? How do we restore it?
