NAIROBI (dpa) – The “coffin budget” is a relative newcomer to the books of Kenyan companies but it is growing all the time in a country where up to 700 people die of AIDS every day.
In Kenya, funeral assistance is part of the duties of the average company, and they, like the economy in general, are feeling the impact of the deadly Acquired Immune Deficiency plague sweeping the continent.
Company directors, long accustomed to dealing with the effects of drought and endemic corruption, now face a new challenge.
“Never before have businessmen had to show as much inventiveness in trying to keep their concerns going,” an AIDS adviser in the Kenyan Chamber of Business says.
“Employees and clients are dying like flies,” a haulier says. “Reliable drivers who have been good workers for 30 years are suddenly unable to work. Finding new drivers is a big problem.”
The pattern repeats itself. A new driver has scarcely learnt the job when he fails to turn up for work for weeks at a time or his work rate drops off.
“A few months later and he is not coming to work at all any more, and the next thing you know you are attending his funeral,” the haulier says.
Long distance lorry drivers and farmers are among the groups in Kenya where the AIDS virus has struck most severely. The infection rate has reached up to 90 per cent along the so-called HIV highway running from Kampala in Uganda to Nairobi, according to estimates.
An increasing number of concerns is now training “doubles”, particularly in posts requiring trained personnel, in order to have a back-up in key jobs, according to the chamber of commerce.
“It often happens that trainers and academics have themselves died,” says Rob Namaara of UNAIDS, the United Nations organization tasked with fighting the disease.
According to studies conducted by UNAIDS and Unicef, the U.N. childrens’ organization, teachers are dying in large numbers.
“Almost weekly we bury one or two students or academics,” the head of Nairobi University told the press recently.
“There are firms with one in four workers HIV positive. Quite apart from the costs from time off owing to sickness and funerals, the employer also has to cover the loss of time at work and resulting loss of production,” says economic researcher Berishon Ikiara of Nairobi University.
Economists believe Kenya’s gross domestic product will decline by 15 per cent over the next four years as a result of AIDS. The epidemic is costing the state around three million dollars a day.
Growth has already come to a standstill in what was once the most productive economy in East Africa, and Uganda and Tanzania, formerly regarded as its weak neighbours, have now overtaken Kenya’s growth rate.
In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni has for years managed to combat the national catastrophe by education – something the Kenyan government is now struggling to emulate.
“Gradually Kenyan firms are coming to the realization that they have to start campaigning on AIDS themselves,” the chamber of commerce spokesman says.
Companies are now organizing seminars aimed at explaining the causes and effects of AIDS to their staff. Large international corporations are also cooperating with international aid organizations to improve the health awareness of their staff.
Condoms are being distributed.
Finance Minister Chris Okemo has at last responded to the crisis and recently proposed lifting import duties on condoms to peals of laughter in parliament. Opposition members said he would seek to make good the loss in taxes by raising fuel duties.
“But if we carry on like this, there will in the end be no customers for fuel at the filling stations,” Ikiara says.
