‘Kidney spare parts’: the need for faultless integrity

Vipuli vya Figo (Kidney Spares) is the title of a Kiswahili novel by my long-time friend, Prof Emmanuel Mbogo.

Mbogo, who is best known as a dramatist, has held long teaching spells at Moi, Maseno and Kenyatta Universities. Curiously, we have not worked side by side with each other all these many years.

The nearest Prof Mbogo and I came to working together was in 2006, when he and I were invited to set up a Department of Performing Arts at what was then called the Kigali Institute of Education (KIE).

It is now a part of the National University of Rwanda. Many Kenyan academics, like my friends and former KU colleagues, Dr Evans Mugarizi and Profs Rocha Chimera, Egara Kabaji and the late Francis Imbuga, had worked there in the early years of Rwandese reconstruction after the 1994 genocide.

Imbuga, who was returning to KU at the expiry of his leave of absence there, had actually recommended me for the job at the KIE, and I gratefully took it up, confident that the maestro had already done a lot of groundwork for me.

My expectations were raised even higher when I learnt that Prof Mbogo would also be joining the faculty.

But things did not work out as I had hoped. I had to leave Kigali abruptly, owing to health reasons, and Ndugu Mbogo had not reported when I left.

I did not find out if he showed up in Kigali. But the last I heard was that he had taken up a post at Kenyatta University (KU), where, indeed, the best brains ought to be.

What is obvious, however, is that Mbogo and I are one Tanzanian and one Ugandan whose addiction to Kenya can never be quenched. Did we call it “Kenyaphilia”?

Back to Mbogo’s Vipuli vya Figo, it is one of the best-known Kiswahili novels of the past few years.

First issued in 1966, it has gone through several editions and reprints and has been widely reviewed in East Africa and elsewhere.

It was on our schools’ Fasihi syllabi for some years, and some of my friends wrote study guides to it. If publishers paid us all our royalties, on time, some of us authors would be rich people.

Anyway, the story of Dr Matoga, a rogue medic and politician, captured the interest and imagination of many Kenyan readers.

Illegal activities

Sacked from his ministerial post through a television announcement, as was often the case in those days, Matoga resorts to all sorts of illegal, immoral and inhuman activities, including the trade in human organs, to maintain his lifestyle.

I will not regale you with further details of the novel, still available in print, and maybe online.

We should note here that, ever since organ donations and transplants became part of mainstream medicine, the procedures have transfixed our attention with both fascination and apprehension.

In East African literature, Vipuli vya Figo was preceded by Eneriko Seruma’s collection of short stories, The Heart-Seller.

The title story there imagines a destitute African willing to sell his heart for transplantation into an American racist.

The latest real-life transplant story to capture my attention was that of the American gentleman who lived for several weeks after receiving a pig’s heart.

Anyway, Mbogo’s Vipuli vya Figo fiction burst into real-life relevance for me with a story that has gripped the Ugandan media over the past two weeks.

The details are hazy, as they often are in these murky stories, and I can only outline to you what I have gathered from the various media channels. We also avoid mentioning names, even where they are known, for obvious reasons.

In brief, a young man had a bodaboda accident and suffered a head injury, which necessitated an operation.

The operation on the head was successful but, the young man claims, on coming around, he found that there was also an incision on the left side of his lower abdomen.

He suspected some kind of mischief at the health facility where he had had his operation, and he settled on the suspicion that one of his kidneys might have been “stolen” by the doctors who operated on him.

Media furore

He went public with his suspicions and that is when the media furore broke out.

Reports, discussions, talk shows and commentaries about the suspicion flooded the print and electronic channels.

Apparently, this affair blended in well with the long-circulating murmurs that many young people were being lured abroad, with job offers, only to get there and find themselves forced or duped into donating their organs.

Through many turns and twists, including investigations and opinions by various authorities, the latest finding on the matter is that the man crying foul was actually born with one kidney.

That is a one-in-a-thousand possibility, according to some statistics, but we need not question the expert opinion. There are two questions uppermost in my mind regarding this incident.

The first is, who is fooling whom? Could the young man have known all along that he had one kidney and chosen this strategic moment to make the outrageous claim about organ theft?

Why would he make this claim against his doctors? Was his intention to embarrass them or to extort some benefits from them?

The bottom line, however, is why the general public should have so readily believed the young man’s story and taken it as seriously as they did.

Our doctors’ ethical integrity is supposed to be and should be, above suspicion. Are some of us beginning to doubt the professional integrity of our healers, over which they swear the time-hallowed Hippocratic Oath?

Impeccable credibility and unimpeachable trustworthiness are imperative in our doctors and other healthcare givers.

Their actions and the whole of their conduct must never give us any reason to doubt them. It is literally a matter of life and death.

Their competence should be not only technical and scientific but also ethical and humane.

Mbogo’s Vipuli vya Figo is competent-based education in that direction.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]