“We are n interesting people. Someone tweets that doctors are on strike & people are dying, there is some excitement on twitter and a real buzz. You tweet that doctors have resumed work and lives are being saved, you sense underwhelment and even disappointment.” Twittered Nick Mangwana.
The trouble with Zanu PF thugs and their acolytes is that they live in their own make-believe world totally divorced from the real Zimbabwe where the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans living in abject poverty live. It is therefore little wonder that Nick, a Zanu PF apologist, has got the wrong end of the stick on the striking doctors.
Why would anyone who cares about the suffering and deaths, especially people suffering and dying from easily treatable ailments. When the story broke that doctors were on strike the ordinary people were angry because they knew this was just the coup de grace, finishing off a health service that had all but died decades ago.
The Zanu PF’s ruling elite are the ones who have killed the country’s health care service by ruthlessly and systematically starved our local hospitals and clinics of funds. The ruling elite started using health care services outside the country decades ago, taking millions and millions of dollars out out of the local health care.
In 2012 alone Robert Mugabe made no few than 8 trips to the Far East for eye check ups at the cost of US$ 3 million each trip, according to the then Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti, who paid the bills. US$ 24 million would have built, equipped and staffed a five star eye-hospital in Zimbabwe.
When Mugabe’s daughter had her baby; she, the husband and entourage of hangers on went to Far East four weeks before due date. Grace Mugabe and her entourage followed a week or so latter and then Mugabe commandeered an Air Zimbabwe plane for a long weekend to collect the family. The total cost in flight, hotel and hospital bills for all these people was a cool US$ 10 million plus. Meanwhile in Zimbabwe new born babies were dying even big hospitals like Mpilo for lack of something as basic as an incubator! One can only imagine the conditions in rural hospitals and clinic!
Two weeks ago VP Constantino Chiwenga was boasting of how he nearly died was it not for the for specialist oesophagus treatment he received in China. He does not understand and/or care Zimbabweans are suffering and hundreds are dying everyday of easily treatable ailments because these are no doctors, nurses, medicines, equipment, electricity, water, etc., etc., etc.
Zimbabweans are disappointed with government’s announcement that doctors have return to work not because they did want the doctors to return but because they know that will not be enough to revive the collapse health care service.
The regime is fishing for praise on the returning doctors and yet has done nothing about paying nurses a living wage, sourcing the medicines, etc.
Zanu PF has managed to get a few doctors to return to work and the regime is agogo with joy although there is still a mountain of work still to do before the country can have a zero star health care service even in the referral hospitals. Such is the depths of despair the nation has sunk!
Zimbabwe is a failed state. This Zanu PF regime has failed to supply even the most basic health care service; that has to be the ultimate measure of a failed state. What is more, Zanu PF has clearly no clue how togged the nation out of this mess, indeed the regime is content with the status quo.
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