Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale’s Ebola story is replete with holes. It is a legless story. I don’t mean to say that it isn’t true, or that it is true. I mean to say that it is a weak and incomplete story, lacking specificity, badly told by a source who had not spent the time to objectively study his audience and accept its hostility, dislike for him and extreme scepticism to the extent that if he tells them “that’s the sun in the sky”, they will answer, “bugger off, that’s the moon”.
So, as a patriotic, national duty, let me school him in the basics, which may not have formed an integral part of his REST units in college. Sharing is caring.
The Dead Cat Strategy originates from a 2013 column by British journalist and politician Boris Johnson in The Telegraph , and he attributed it to an Australian master of the dark arts, believed to be a man called Lynton Crosby. It is simple: if you are losing an argument at dinner, throw a dead cat on the table, shift their attention to the new stinky dinner mate. For it to work, the dead cat must actually be dead cat, not a stuffed animal or some other fake ruse. If you want to introduce a narrative, divert attention or shift focus, you need an airtight story.
What Mr Duale told us was a fluffy buju-buju tale, the kind that Kenya’s rambunctious crowd would love to disbelieve and make ridiculous memes out of. His story was basically that a Kenyan of North Eastern extraction lived somewhere in a country so huge that it has two time zones and no infrastructure, where he did something for seven years. Then he fell ill a month ago and was hospitalised. If he had Ebola, or presented the symptoms, he must have been quarantined in a fairly secure facility. Somehow, he broke out, made his way to the Ugandan border, which is closed and patrolled by the Uganda People’s Defence Forces, a fierce if a bit low-tech army that is fairly effective when it is not being misused by Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Museveni’s bully of a son, to torture critics in Nyayo House-tyle basements.
Upon entering Uganda through an unknown border crossing, he procures unknown means to Entebbe and mixes with the entire unsuspecting population at the airport, boards my favourite airline, JamboJet, and makes his way to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport where our highly trained, hawk-eyed Port Health guardians subject him to a battery of sophisticated tests, using the very latest and working equipment.
Sadly, because our guy has been on medication, and despite the fact that he is very sick, all his symptoms are missed and he is waved through.
He is allowed to join the mass of humanity clearing Immigration and Customs where upon exiting, he finds a waiting ambulance that whisks him to Nairobi’s best hospital, recently taken over by unknown powerful forces, The Nairobi Hospital, whereupon he is triaged and processed in the normal manner, all the while mixing with unsuspecting patients and medics.
At some unknown stage, the tests finally powered through the medication he had been pumped full of, or some keen medic noted where he was coming from, and the secrets of our patient zero were suspected. Samples were collected and sent to sophisticated sounding labs, and finally it was determined that our guy had the thing. But before you could say Jack Robinson, our poor fellow sadly died and was buried by a strangely amateurish bunch in hazmat suits and apparently no gloves? Abuju-buju, buju-buju!
Sitting in the cool shade of a mukuu tree in Makandune with shoes off and a cup of purple tea at my elbow, and because I am very good at this, the mmbest – I started doing it before your mum met your dad – I place a call to a source in Mpondwe, on the Ugandan border. I have, or had, sources in the very kitchens of hell.
This bugger who is said to have brought Ebola to Kenya, where was he from?
Just an Arab. (This means probably slender, bony face and loose hair)
He flew from Bunia to Beni, then took a Probox to Kasindi. (Border town on the DRC side).
The border is closed, how did he get past Ugandan security?
This is not information, this is a promising lead. But it builds the gantry of the story. Next, send some expense money, get the broker on board, identify the Probox car driver, and the specific flight from Bunia.
It all ends with getting on the bus to Kampala, down to Mpondwe, first to get copies of patient zero’s Immigration documents, begin to build his identity and personality from the driver and broker, then smuggle yourself into the hot zone and head to Bunia. In about two weeks, an airtight story will be ready, with unimpeachable facts – led by a clear profile of Mr Zero, together with his photo.
