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What Will Save the Children? Not Politics
The Standard (Zimbabwe)
February 03, 2008

http://allafrica.com/stories/200802040807.html

The temptation is irresistible to be melodramatic when analysing the state of our health delivery system. One reason is this invariably concerns life and death.

For a government to be found culpable in the negligence of its citizens' lives is an indictment of its entire claim to being in power at all.

People facing illness are not the victims of a natural disaster such as a storm, floods or a raging inferno in a forest. They are sick. With the proper care and medication they can recover.

If a government cannot guarantee its citizens' health, what good is it? Our health delivery system has been in decline for a number of years, chiefly through a shortage of essential drugs and a shortage of key personnel.

Recent details of the state of affairs at Harare and Parirenyatwa hospitals provide disturbing levels of irresponsible conduct by the government. In a number of democracies, there would have been calls for the minister to resign.

Others would take the extreme view that the government must resign. In a quasi-one party dictatorship such as Zimbabwe, that would be tantamount to whistling in the wind.

But if newly-born babies' chances of survival are reduced to near-zero, as they are at Harare hospital's neonatal unit, how can a government claim it is performing its bounden duty to protect its citizens, among them helpless, newly-born babies?

And if surgeons at Parirenyatwa hospital threaten not to perform surgery, unless the facilities are improved, there can be no sensible reaction other than to call for those responsible to resign or be fired.

Nobody doubts that, notwithstanding the positive noises from certain quarters, the state of our economy is extremely parlous. It can't be anything else, what with wild inflation and an anaemic currency tottering towards an abyss of worthlessness?

The damage to our health delivery system is a result of a topsy-turvy choice of priorities: defence gets a lion's share while health receives almost a pittance.

Politics plays a huge role in these choices, probably because Zanu PF is so obsessed with clinging to power it would do anything to please its constituency, even if in doing so it endangers the health of the people.

In fact, it would not be far-fetched to surmise that most of our economic woes can be traced to a preoccupation with politics.

The exodus of doctors, nurses and specialists to other countries results from low pay and primitive working conditions. Then there is the pathetic state of the medical institutions, from the rural health centres to the big, metropolitan hospitals.

Again, it is the government's bull-headed political choices which have led us into this cul-de-sac of helplessness, not only in the health delivery system but in other fields as well. It would be inaccurate to say we have become friendless, but the number of countries ready to come to our aid is no longer as varied as before 2000.

The policy of "going it alone" has lost us many former allies. The likelihood of the number of those disenchanted with Zanu PF's politics rising is very real, if the harmonised elections next month are conducted with the same questionable integrity as others before them.

There are many countries out there waiting to come to the aid of a country once seen as having the potential to be one of the gems of Africa.

Now, with children "dying like flies" in a government hospital, it has been reduced to a basket case - and all because of mule-headed political choices.

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