Chair, Council of Governors,

Cabinet Secretaries,

County Governors,

Principal Secretaries,

Ambassador of Japan, H.E. Ryoichi Horie,

Secretary General UCLGA, Mr. Jean Pierre Elong Mbassi,

Representatives of the various development partners present,

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is with great pleasure that I open this Virtual Conference.  I am particularly pleased that today’s assembly is a congregation of solution givers. 

Permit me to begin my statement, by conveying my heartfelt condolences to all families, who have lost loved ones to this deadly disease.

This Conference brings together a multi-disciplinary community of problem-solvers;leaders and a group of professionals, and policy practitioners, who have applied their minds to the COVID-19 pandemic for the last six months.

I commend the Council of Governors for bringing us together.  This forum affirms the unique place of county governments in the structure of our governance and towards the realization of our national values, which includes public participation.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today’s engagements bring together an assembly of the country’s foremost Brain Trust on COVID-19. Everyone present here has agonized in their area of professional practice, over how to manage and end this crisis.

Most of you have experienced anxiety as you crunch numbers, rationalize models and contemplate over what should be best decisions for our country. 

On my part, as President, I have been called upon to make weighty decisions that presented the most unique dilemma to me as the Head of State.  More often than not, as I have indicated in my previous statements, the agonizing dilemma was one between two rights.  

Never before, in the history of our nation has the Head of State been called upon to invoke the Public Health Act, and issue containment measures that would significantly affect the enjoyment of various liberties, rights, and freedoms of our people.

Never before have families had to make choices as to who will lay a departed loved one to rest. Never have we failed to share in the joy of witnessing our children’s union in Marriage. Never has our individual and collective courage to believe there will be a better day, been tried like it has been over the last six months. 

And so today, we gather here to harvest the results of these collective experiences and chart a way forward for our nation’s future.   We are here to collect and build on the best practices you have recorded in the last six months.

And if you are the custodians of best practice in the fight against COVID-19, you must remember that best practice is NEVER implemented retrospectively.  It MUST be applied instantaneously. 

Timely and instantaneous implementation of what has worked, is what will take us forward and most significantly secure the gains we continue to make.

 But as we implement best practice after the counsel of this conference, our shared goal must also remain in sight.  And this goal is simple: Victory over COVID-19 and nothing less.  We must achieve it at ZERO OPTION.

And to achieve it, we must begin by building positive resilience.  We must move away from tactical response to this pandemic, to strategic response.  Instead of symptomatic reactions to this crisis, we must move to structural reactions that are long-term and transformative. 

And this is what I call positive resilience – being able to anticipate the patterns of this pandemic, responding to it transformatively and ’building-back’ better.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me now to suggest a framework for ‘banking’ your experiences of the last six months in this conference.  This framework has three elements to it.

First, I want you to do a post-mortem analysis of how we have handled the COVID-19 crisis six months after it became manifest.  Begin by looking at the forecasting of the spread of the virus. 

If our models had projected severe scenarios that did not happen, was it because we were forewarned or was it because of the swift interventions we put in place? 

How does our national response compare with others within the region, the continent and the world?  Is there something we could have done better and are there lessons we should carry with us to the strategic phase of this war.  

Ladies and Gentlemen,

And I am not asking you to ponder these questions because you failed us.  To the contrary, you did remarkably well and that is why we have begun to flatten the curve.  But to do better, we must remain brutally honest with our approaches, because intellectual honesty is critical to building resilience.

Secondly, after doing a post-mortem analysis, I invite you to do some in-mortem analysis.  Ladies and Gentlemen, we are in the middle of a crisis and we must analyze it as it unfolds and changes form.  The good news, though, is that in the middle of this crisis, the curve is beginning to flatten.

However, we must celebrate this happy moment with caution.  More so because, a curve begins to flatten after it reaches its highest point. This point is also called the inflexion point. 

And it is the most dangerous point because, the curve can either flatten and de-escalate, or take an upward surge.

My appeal to you as experts and practitioners is, therefore, to deliberate on our in-mortem condition.  Although the curve is beginning to flatten, could it surprise us by taking an upward surge at this inflexion point?

My third invitation is for you to do a pre-mortem analysis.  This is about early warning. But more fundamentally, it is about long-term responses.  If, indeed, we are to shift our response from tactical to strategic interventions, we must do a simulation of how this will work.

A shift from symptomatic response under COVID-19 to structural response under Universal Health Coverage, must be well thought out.

How, for instance, will the environment respond to this shift and what are the enablers and disablers of this undertaking?

Pre-mortem analysis will help us chart the path to sustainable health provisioning for all.  Using this model, the conference should, therefore, give us counsel on how to promote preventive medicine over symptomatic care. 

It should guide us on how to use the lessons learnt from COVID-19 experiences in order to anchor the full national rollout of the Universal Health Coverage, one of the pillars of my Administration’s Agenda for the Nation – The Big Four.

But more importantly, this conference of experts and stakeholders should use pre-mortem analysis to guide us on how to build positive resilience out of the COVID experience.

We must use this experience and lessons learnt to ‘build-back better’ and to create a society capable of absorbing shock and emerging on top; but most crucially, a society which unites when called upon to do so in the face of such a monumental challenge.

As I conclude, I challenge all of us to reflect on how we can position our country to emerge as a stronger and more responsive State, from the current pandemic.

With that, Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish you productive deliberations and, more importantly, look forward to your counsel on steps we could adopt to fully conquer this invisible enemy.

It is now my pleasure to declare this Conference officially opened.

Thank You, God Bless You and God Bless Kenya.