The much-promoted Social Health Authority was launched with hope-inspiring fanfare on the first day of October last year.
The dream then was that the shambolic National Health Insurance Fund needed to fold; and a new, efficient and transparent SHA would take its place.
But only months after the lofty pledges, SHA has quickly morphed into a symbol of corruption in which phantom hospitals have received hundreds of millions of shillings for treating ghost patients.
Aden Duale, the Cabinet Secretary for Health, is one of the few members of the Cabinet with a reputation for dealing head-on with political or administrative controversies.
But every indication is that the Ministry of Health graft lords have such a tenacious and powerful hold on the operations. The rebrand seems to have been only a change of name. All the ills of NHIF are written all over SHA.
Duale has been in public service long enough to know that darkness and obfuscation are the killers of trust.
Yet that is the very decision he and his administrators made on Monday when the list of hospitals and the claims they have made was pulled down without even as much as an excuse.
Duale must get the website back; otherwise, he will have handed the cartels the victory they crave.
Quote of the day: “Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.” —American civil rights activist and writer W E B Du Bois died on August 27, 1963
