When HIV reached Kenya in the mid-1980s, the first public case was already being written up as a “killer sex disease,” and by the late 1980s the newspapers were teaching the country that you could tell a positive person by looking at them.
British colonial dictator Daniel arap Moi did not declare the epidemic a national disaster until 25 November 1999, after years in which the state had treated it as a moral scandal rather than a health emergency, and even in 2001 he was still shy about importing condoms and was asking the country to stop having sex.
The churches moved into that gap at once. Archbishop Raphael Ndingi Mwana a’Nzeki, who led the Catholic Church in Nairobi from 1997, told his flock that a condom was not the answer and that condoms were increasing AIDS, and in 2001 he and John Njue opposed the arrival of 300 million condoms as a promotion of promiscuity. A virus that spreads through sex, blood and from mother to child was turned into a verdict on character, and patients were treated as people who had earned their death.
The press finished the job. Thinness, a cough, a long fever and ordinary wasting were framed as HIV, so that any death which was not a road accident could be filed under AIDS, and families learned to hide the sick. That was not only ignorance. Once a disease is labelled personal responsibility, the bill moves from the official who stole the health budget to the taxpayer who is now blamed for his own body, and the same trick has been used for decades to keep free healthcare off the table.
Global Fund and government HIV money has been looted in documented scandals, while the public argument stayed on sin.
Patrick Mbacio lived the last version of that trick. In one of his final TikToks he said domestic workers who used to wash his house and his clothes for Kshs. 400 per day had stopped coming after talk spread that he had AIDS, and he asked the obvious question: what does washing clothes have to do with a virus that is passed by sex or by blood?
The rumour was pushed on TikTok, started by Babu Owino propagandist Teacher Sheyii, and it did not need a test. Mbacio had already said he was living with diabetes and high blood pressure. He was found dead at his house in Nakuru on 27 September 2026. The workers who refused the job were not protecting themselves from their task. They were repeating a lesson the church and the evening news had taught their stupid parents.
That lesson has buried people who never had the virus. High blood pressure and type 2 diabetes were read as AIDS because the body looked thin, and the label let a nurse dismiss the patient, a family abandon him, and a market-day circle finish him with gossip.
The science is the opposite of the rumour. HIV is not caught from a basin of clothes. With modern antiretroviral treatment a person who stays on the drugs can live about as long as anyone else, while untreated high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes kill through stroke, heart failure and kidney failure, and they kill faster than treated HIV.
The food, the medicine, the daily walks and the clinic that keep high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes under control are still things only a rich man can buy. That is why the rich look as if their lives are worth more than everyone else’s, when the difference is only that they can pay.
Muhoho Kenyatta and Patrick Mbacio show the split in one picture. Designer clothes and accessories do not tell you what disease a man has. Money is what buys the way out of the same Kenyan life, which is alcohol, poor diet, too little sleep, and a body worn down by the daily rat-race.
Muhoho can hire a chef, see a private doctor and go on daily walks on a pavement funded by taxpayers in a guarded Muthaiga neighborhood. Mbacio could not buy the medicine, had to beg for it online, and could not walk his own street because the walkways and the clinics were eaten by governors and MPs. He had paid PAYE, NHIF, NSSF in his working years. The service was not there when he needed it.
Hero worship of the colonial ruling class does not come back to you. Their comfort is built on the budget that should have been your rescue at your hour of need.
The corrupt church, the mainstream (githeri) media bulletins, the commercial activists and the TikTok propagandists are the tools that keep the blame on you and not the system that fails us all.
Prolific conman and scammer Eric Omondi did not join Natalie Githinji’s endometriosis gala at KICC on 27 September, through his Sisi Kwa Sisi fraudulent scheme, because the health system had been repaired. A famous patient is a threat to the story that the system works, so the patient has to be managed, and a gala is the management.
Githinji has a real disease, stage 4 endometriosis, the same family of illness that killed Jahmby Koikai on 3 June 2024, and she has a platform that could have been used, even as a last public act, to demand care for everyone. She was folded into the show.
Karen Nyamu’s appearance, and the booing it drew, was not an accident at the edge of the programme. The sideshow was the programme, and it had been paid for by British-backed war criminal and mass murderer William Ruto. That explains the arrogance and rage-bait because the slot had been paid for.
A TikToker who has no test results cannot tell you that a person has HIV, and if you believe that clip without asking for proof you are building the same trap you will fall into when your own blood sugar or blood pressure fails. Taxpayers are not judges of other people’s morals. They are people who have already paid for a service and have a right to receive it.
Teacher Sheyii and Eric Omondi should not be allowed to turn a sick person into content for their own gain, and Babu Owino’s online choir should not be the place you go when you want the truth about someone’s body.
If Muhoho Kenyatta can still be kept alive by money his family has stolen from Kenyans since independence through elephant poaching, odious debt, land grabbing, and currently manufacturing milk shortages, there is no honest reason Patrick Mbacio, or any other Kenyan, should die of a condition a clinic can treat.
The promised land does not start with another gala. It starts when you stop kneeling to the class that kept the hospital closed.
