Mugabe chides doctors to "put people first" - nonsense, service build on benevolence will collapse. By W Mukori

Mugabe chides doctors for putting money before the wellbeing of their patients.

"We appreciate the work of doctors, they deserve to be rewarded accordingly. However, they must also understand the limitations the government is facing. We are still fighting for our liberation, there are sanctions that are affecting our capacity to honour our obligations to workers," said Mugabe.

"Dr Muchemwa, as one of the first doctors who gave medical services to the liberation war fighters, had that understanding and we need his peers to understand also, he never put money first, but the people first and made great sacrifices. Right now as I speak there is a stand-off between our medical staff and us the government on remuneration."

He was commenting on the on-going saga of private sector doctors who are now demanding cash payment up front from patients whose medical aid institutions have failed to on time the doctors for services rendered. Some of the bills have not been paid for years and, to rub salt into the doctors’ open wounds, government has been forcing them to pay income tax on unpaid income!

Mugabe’s habit of blaming the country’s worsening economic crisis on sanctions is utter nonsense and an insult to every thinking Zimbabwean. How can the nation prosper when corruption is so rampant that $15 billion in diamond revenue alone, by his own admission, is looted and no one is arrested and, for all we know, the looting is still going on right now!

Given these are targeted sanctions, how is it then that they are affected everyone else except the targeted individuals? There is no money to pay civil servants their below poverty-line wages and yet there is plenty of cash to pay for Mugabe and his family's extravagant lifestyles, for example. In the first five months of this year alone he has squandered $80 million on overseas trips alone, according to a local report.

When Mugabe rigged the 2013 elections he was cocksure he would go on to rig economic recovery too with his $27 billion ZImAsset economic plan. The plan was going to create 2.2 million new jobs in five years; there two out of the five years left and the nation has not seen any new jobs. Instead of acknowledging there will be no economic recovery because the ZimAsset plan is dead in the water; not even the "all weather" Chinese friends were prepared to bankroll the exorbitantly expensive hare-brain scheme; Mugabe continues to blame the sanctions for the economic crisis.

Zimbabwe's economic meltdown is real and it is causing untold human suffering and claiming human lives. If Mugabe real value human lives over his insatiable greed for absolute political power and the vast material wealth in the form of looted resources it has brought him and his cronies then he must finally accept that it is corrupt and tyrannical rule that is the root cause of the economic meltdown. Just how long can he continue to hide behind the sanctions finger whilst the nation suffer and die!  

After 36 years of mismanagement, corruption and lawlessness these problems are now deeply imbedded in the nation, it will take a tough and visionary government to uproot them to get the national economy back on track. This Zanu PF regime is the one spawned the problems and allowed them to grow and spread; it is naïve to the regime to be the tough and visionary government.

The only practical way to get the visionary government is for the nation implement the 2008 GPA democratic reforms, everyone agreed at the time were necessary for free, fair and credible elections, and then hold fresh elections. There is nothing to be gained from refusing to admit Zanu PF has failed just as there is nothing to be gained from chiding the private sector doctors for asking to be paid for their work!

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest," said the great Economist, Adam Smith.

Government has failed to pay the country’s public sector health service bills and with even big referral hospitals like Parirenyatwa are now in such a deplorable state the hospital often gone for days on end without something as basic as clean running water! If private doctors are forced to continue treating these patients and not be paid it will not be long before the private sector health service too falls into the same sorry state as the public sector.

“It is not from the benevolence of the doctors that we expect our health care services, but from their regard to their own interest,” to paraphrase Adam Smith. After all, these doctors too need their dinner and the butcher, brewer, etc. would be touched to hear they are treating their patients for free but still expect to doctors to pay cash for their meat, beer, etc.!