Coronavirus Crisis: Towering Lessons from the Giraffe and a Crossover of Care and Caution

A giraffe of the Tsavo cautiously crossing the road. The irony of the tallest neck which is still too short to reach the ground without squatting awkwardly to drink water is symbolic of the paradoxes of nature’s endowments.

Towering at about six metres tall, able to run at nearly 60km/h, having good eyesight capable of discriminating colours, sleeping in short naps confined to five minutes up to a total of only 30 minutes in a day — sparing some 20 hours daily for eating on the go, naturally found only in Africa but boasting a long neck which, ironically, cannot reach the ground and forces an awkward squatting posture to meet nature’s basic need of drinking water, the giraffe symbolically communicates key lessons to humans in these times of worldwide coronavirus crisis and a forced lockdown of socioeconomic activities. Her long gestation period of 15 months has no less of a critical lesson on how long it may take to birth the process of recovering from the coronavirus crisis.

As I write this piece, a tower of giraffes has just crossed the road, forcing us to decelerate with care and caution to ensure nothing bad happens to the animals or to us in the car. This is a journey across the Tsavo towards the border of Kenya and Tanzania near Lake Jipe.

This week, Kenya is courting the crisis of COVID-19 as the number of confirmed cases advances in double digits. A dusk to dawn curfew has been imposed as a balancing act of trying to contain the spread of the virus while simultaneously allowing…