Securitizing Health: An Analysis of Kenya’s Response to Covid-19 In 2020

The study’s focus was on how Kenya responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in the year 2020. The objectives of the study were to understand how the country securitized the pandemic, the public policy options that supported the response and to examine how Kenyans perceived the countermeasures fronted by the government. The securitization theory was employed in analyzing Kenya’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic after the first case was announced on 13th March 2020. The mixed method research design was therefore used in the analysis of prominent actors’ speeches in 2020, the policy options fronted, and Kenyans lived realities in response to the pandemic. The speeches, through discourse analysis, not only revealed the use of security language to counter the spread of Covid-19 but also unveiled the policy options that were fronted by the government. The survey and semi-structured interviews showed that Kenyans preferred public health policies like washing hands, sanitizing, social distancing and no masks, no services to the use of security-led responses in ensuring compliance to set government countermeasures. Security-led responses revealed that issues like police brutality, corruption, fear, stigma and discrimination cropped up in trying to contain the pandemic. The study thus concluded that Kenya did securitize the pandemic thus proving that the securitization theory can be applied in non-European states. More so, it revealed that multidisciplinary measures are needed in mitigating health issues that threaten state survival. However, health experts should be the frontrunners in developing mitigating measures against health threats. The study therefore recommends that states should take a balanced approach of both public health and security policies while responding to a pandemic. Hence, education and advocacy approach are more appropriate in extenuating health threats in the long-run but in the short-run, when health threats are ambiguous the government can use securitization as the first mitigation measure.