How wonderful that death, at least, does not discriminate against the poor
The Mt Kenya Times 
By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
Every eleven seconds, somewhere on this earth, a child under the age of five draws a final breath not from war, not from earthquake, not from the inexorable tide of some exotic plague, but from poverty. From the profound, grinding, entirely preventable condition of not having enough. That is the fact with which we must begin, because facts are the only honest currency in a conversation that humanity has long preferred to conduct in the comfortable coin of sentiment and strategic amnesia. Eleven seconds. Read that again. And again. Let it settle in the chest like a stone.
Death, we are often told by those who have mastered the art of consoling the living, is the great equalizer. It is the democracy none of us can escape, the referendum in which every vote is cast in flesh and bone. Kings and paupers, philosophers and fools, the man in the mansion and the woman beneath the flyover bridge all shall bow, all shall return to dust. It is a beautiful idea. It is also, in the most consequential sense possible, a lie. Death is not equal. Death is not democratic. Death, like almost everything else in the architecture of human civilisation, has always had its favourites.
Walk into any neonatal ward in a well-resourced hospital in Nairobi’s leafy suburbs, and then walk into one in Turkana or Mandera, and tell me with a straight face that the infant in each place faces the same odds. Tell me that the woman delivering in a county referral hospital with one functioning incubator shared between a corridor of desperate mothers is meeting death on the same terms as the woman whose obstetrician has been selected from a pamphlet of specialists. We have built an entire civilisation on the pretence of equality before death while meticulously ensuring that death arrives earlier, more violently, and far more predictably for those who were born on the wrong side of the ledger.
There is a particular cruelty in the way we speak about mortality. We wrap it in philosophy and theology, we dress it in the robes of the universal and the inevitable, and in doing so we launder the specific social crimes that determine who dies young and who lives long enough to complain about the indignities of age. When a child in a slum dies of a waterborne disease that has not threatened a middle-class neighbourhood in living memory, we call it tragic. We light candles. We post condolences. What we rarely do, what we almost constitutionally refuse to do, is call it what it is: a policy outcome.
The poet in us wants to believe that in the final moment, in that narrow passage between breath and silence, all human beings stand equal. Perhaps they do. But the road to that passage is not equal at all. It is paved, in some places, with the finest interventions that medical science can offer early screening, preventive care, personalized medicine, the extraordinary arsenal of a health system that sees its citizens as worth preserving. And in other places, the road to death is rutted and unpaved, strewn with the rubble of underfunded clinics, absent doctors, expired medication, and the bureaucratic cruelty of a system that charges a consultation fee to a mother who walked three hours to reach it.
We speak of life expectancy as though it were a neutral statistic, a mere arithmetic of the biological. But life expectancy is a political document. It is a verdict delivered by governments upon their people, a measure not merely of how long the body endures but of how much the state has decided a particular life is worth sustaining. In Kenya, as in most of the world, that verdict falls with devastating consistency along the lines of geography, income, ethnicity, and gender. The child born into a pastoral community in the arid north does not merely face a harsher climate. She faces a harsher arithmetic of survival, one that was written into the national budget long before she was born.
And then there is war. Let us not pretend that war, too, is blind. The wars that consume the poorest communities on earth are not fought for the ideals of those communities. They are fuelled, more often than not, by interests that reside far from the frontlines in boardrooms, in diplomatic lounges, in the quiet corridors of power where the calculus of geopolitics is conducted with a coldness that would shame a mathematician. The child soldier, the bombed marketplace, the refugee drowning in a sea that was never meant to receive her these are not accidents of history. They are, with nauseating regularity, the predictable outputs of decisions made by those who will never themselves be asked to die for them.
It would be easy, and it would be dishonest, to restrict this indictment to the failures of distant governments and faceless institutions. We must look closer. We must look at ourselves at the ways in which we, ordinary people, have colluded with the mythology of equal death. Every time we accept the explanation that the poor die younger because of their lifestyle choices, their diet, their alleged fatalism, we participate in a fiction. We participate in the evasion of structural accountability. We allow the conversation to be redirected from the murderer to the murdered, from the system to the symptom, from the cause to the corpse.
The theologians among us have wrestled with these questions at the intersection of faith and public life will remind us that human beings are made in the image of the divine, that each life carries an inalienable dignity that no government can confer and none should dare to destroy. If we hold that belief, and hold it seriously, then the differential mortality rates of the poor and the wealthy are not merely a political problem. They are a theological crisis. They are an indictment of our collective fidelity to the values we profess. Every preventable death in a marginalised community is a statement about what we actually believe, as opposed to what we merely claim to believe.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote that the pen is mightier than the sword, but that the gun of oppression has the final answer in many places. He was right and yet, the pen must not fall silent. The death of language around these matters, the sanitized vocabulary of development-speak and policy briefs, is itself a form of violence. When we say a community is experiencing elevated under-five mortality, we are describing dead children in the passive voice. When we say maternal health indicators are suboptimal in rural areas, we are describing women who died giving life in a language designed to keep us at a clinical distance from our grief and from our guilt. We should name what is happening. Children are dying. Women are dying. They are dying because decisions were made and we should have the courage to say that plainly.
There is hope in this and I insist on naming it, because despair is a luxury that the dying cannot afford, and neither should the living. Across this continent and across this world, there are communities, advocates, researchers, and leaders who refuse the counsel of inevitability. Who understand that the mortality gap is not a law of nature but a law of neglect, and that what neglect has made, political will can unmake. Every dollar redirected toward primary healthcare, every girl kept in school, every community health worker trained and paid and respected these are acts of defiance against the tyranny of unequal death. They are small rebellions, and they add up.
We began with a fact: a child dies every eleven seconds from preventable causes. Let us end with a demand: that this fact be treated not as a tragedy to be mourned but as a crime to be prosecuted in the court of public conscience, in the legislature, in the design of every budget and every policy that governs how public resources are allocated and for whose lives they are spent. Death may not be defeatable. But the democracy of death the lie that it comes for us all in equal measure can be. That lie, we must kill it ourselves, and bury it without ceremony.
The writer is a social commentator
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