By TEE NGUGI

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Skeletons of bones walking to lonely graves”. This line, picked from a novel, conjures up haunting images of emaciated bodies, mere skin and bones, walking in slow motion, eyes wide open and sad, to open graves dug in sandy soil. One imagines the wind blowing dust across vast empty plains. The line, and the imagery it evokes, is a figment of the imagination.

Or is it? The line could be voice-over narration of the images reaching us of famine-hit areas of northern Kenya.

These images feature wasted bodies lying on the dusty ground, too weak to sit up, staring with death-haunted eyes at the cameras.

There is a footage showing a man piling up rocks on his wife’s grave. Journalists on the ground reported that similar mounds of rock dot the scorched empty landscape.

But the government came out to claim, using the usual sophistry, that there “was no cause for alarm” and that reports of deaths were fake.

The horrifying reality shown and reported by journalists on location and the obvious lies of government triggered visceral anger on social media.

One post showed a wasted figure, his eyes wild with the fear of death, and sarcastically wondered if people looked like that because of leading a pampered life. Other posts expressed violent anger at the government that I cannot repeat here.

There were several particulars about that odd government press conference that captured the ineptitude of the state and its disconnection from the reality of Kenya.

The government officials talked on the steps of a government office. Not a single one of them had taken time off from their busy schedule of campaigning for 2022 to fly over the affected areas to make an assessment.

At that press briefing, the deputy president was flanked by several CSs—agriculture, devolution, Treasury and water. Also in attendance were officials of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

Now, the deputy president is leading a vociferous fight against efforts to stem epic-scale corruption.

The Treasury CS, looking as if he wanted to be in a hole, was recently questioned by police over suspect payments for the construction of dams. The only indications that such construction was intended are writings on forlorn boards.

The Water CS and his Agriculture counterpart have been questioned by parliament and summoned by the police over the same matter. At the press briefing, the Agriculture CS announced that the government would build close to 30 dams before the next rains.

How all those dams can be built in a matter of a few months boggles the mind. Clearly, after presiding over serial failures at the department, the man has elected to dabble in magic. The Devolution CS somnolently talked of there being enough food.

Then a tumbocrat from NDMA, an agency whose purpose, it now seems, is to find the science and research to support government lies, used twisted logic to claim that none of the deaths could be directly linked to famine.

Oh such sublime logic, sir. But we know that conditions are worsened by lack of nutrition and that even a healthy person could succumb to illnesses he would otherwise have beaten back had he had water and proper food. At any rate, a doctor does not say a person died from a car crash. She talks of the trauma to various body organs the accident caused.

The cast above represents the people in whose hands we have entrusted the management of our affairs and those of our children and grandchildren.

The questions many on social and mainstream media were asking are the same that we ask after deaths from famine. Why is there not, after more than 50 years of independence, a mechanism to get food to affected areas as soon as experts issue a famine alert? Why has there never been a serious attempt to irrigate these lands and turn them into food-producing areas like Israel has done?

A year ago, experts discovered underground water in Turkana that could be used for this purpose. Why was not getting that water out of the ground given priority? Even a BBC report pointed at these missed opportunities, hinting that death and hunger due to famine are avoidable.

True; these deaths and suffering could be avoided. But in making that observation, the assumption is that you have a responsible government working beyond the call of duty for the welfare of its citizens. A thieving government that lies in the face of inconvertible truth is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.