OPINION: A deadly virus, and the centre U.S wants on Kenyan soil

By Agbegnigan Yaovi

Behind the confrontation now unfolding in Kenya lies a simple, grim fact: Ebola is one of the deadliest and most contagious diseases known, and it is that danger the United States says it is trying to keep at bay. To do so, Washington wants a quarantine centre on Kenyan soil, and American military aircraft have been landing at Laikipia Air Base to help make it a reality.

The fear the virus inspires is not misplaced. Ebola is rare but frequently fatal. Symptoms can take anywhere from two to twenty-one days to appear, and when they come, they arrive suddenly, resembling flu or malaria at first, with fever, headache and exhaustion. As the illness advances, vomiting and diarrhoea set in, organs can begin to fail, and some, though not all, patients suffer internal and external bleeding.

What makes it so dangerous is how it moves. The virus passes from person to person through contact with infected bodily fluids such as blood or vomit. For years, outbreaks tended to be small and confined to remote rural areas, where they could be contained. That is changing. As towns and cities expand, larger populations are being pushed closer to the natural reservoirs where the virus lives, raising the risk that a local flare-up becomes something far harder to stop.

It is against that backdrop that the United States has moved to build its facility at Laikipia, a 50-bed centre intended to hold American citizens exposed to the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The stated logic is containment: keep those who may be infected close to the outbreak, and away from American soil, until the danger passes.

Washington is prepared to pay heavily for it. The White House has asked Congress for more than USD 1.4 billion to confront the outbreak, including some USD 800 million tied to the Kenyan centre, covering not only the building itself but supplies, treatment, contact tracing, a regional logistics network and infection-control measures. And the American presence on the ground is already visible: US Air Force flights have continued to arrive at Laikipia in support of the project.

Yet the same danger that Washington cites as its reason for building the centre is precisely what has turned the people living beside it against the plan. In Nanyuki, the town nearest the site, protests have run for at least two consecutive weeks in June. Demonstrators threw up burning barricades; police responded with live rounds, tear gas and water cannon. The confrontations proved deadly, with two protesters shot dead by police and at least one more killed in the clashes that followed.

The objection is not hard to understand. A facility built to shield Americans from a lethal virus is being placed among Kenyans who never asked to host it, and who now fear that the very disease it is meant to contain could reach them instead. For Washington the centre is a shield. For Nanyuki, it looks like the risk itself has been moved to their doorstep, and the arriving aircraft are a daily reminder of who the shield was built to protect.