Zimbabwe’s health delivery system has collapsed amid worsening shortages of nursing staff and a doctors strike, a local doctors group said on Friday.
Inadequate remuneration and unacceptable working conditions for health workers across the country have resulted in a crisis that has left the country’s major referral hospitals unable to function, the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) said in a statement.
The emptying of central and other hospitals of staff, and therefore of patients, means the health service has collapsed, it said.
Some junior doctors at Harare’s two major hospitals began a strike late last month. Nurses too are reported to be staying away because they cannot afford to pay bus fares to work.
Independent reports said on Thursday that around 200 doctors at major hospitals in Harare had decided to join in the strike action to press for higher pay, car loans and better working conditions.
The loss of life and increased morbidity resulting from the absence of health workers at their places of work, whether resulting from inability to pay for transport or from actual strike action, remains the responsibility of the government, ZADHR said.
Junior doctors are reported to be earning a basic salary minus allowances of just Z$252 000 per month, less than one US dollar a day at black market rates.
The cost of living is spiralling upwards on a daily basis in crisis-riddled Zimbabwe, where the annual rate of inflation has reached 3 714%
Doctors in Harare and the second city of Bulawayo only went back to work in March following a two-month-long strike begun in December.
The authorities had to bring in the army to help run city hospitals and 136 Cuban doctors have arrived to staff rural clinics.
Security forces on alert
President Robert Mugabe accused Britain of backing what he called a terror campaign by his opponents and said his nation’s security forces were on heightened alert.
Mugabe, addressing police recruits at a parade, urged his countrymen to unite against ”shameless arm twisting tactics” by Britain and political opponents seeking his ouster, state radio and the official Herald newspaper said.
Independent human rights groups say the police, troops and ruling party militants were responsible for most of the violence that has wracked the country in more than six years of political and economic turmoil.
The agriculture-based economy in the former regional breadbasket collapsed after Mugabe ordered the often violent seizures of thousands of white-owned commercial farms in 2000.
”Our security forces have heightened their vigilance to thwart the subversive manoeuvers of those who engage in crimes of political violence and ensure that violence of whatever nature is not allowed to rear its ugly head in this country,” Mugabe said.
The government accuses the opposition Movement for Democratic Change of mounting a series of gasoline bomb attacks in recent months, charges the opposition denies.
While Britain and its Western allies criticised police for enforcing law and order, they ignored opposition violence that occurred after the main opposition party was ”egged on by its masters”, Mugabe said.
”The so-called masters of democracy, who are known for their double standards, have ignored or underplayed this vicious campaign of unrestrained acts of terror and instead sought to besmirch the government for enforcing law and order,” he told recruits on Thursday at the Morris police depot in Harare, according to the state media.
In March, Mugabe praised police for violently crushing an opposition-led prayer meeting and assaulting opposition leaders in custody. Several opposition leaders suffered broken bones and most, including opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, required hospital treatment.
Lawyers defending opposition activists were beaten up by police as they dispersed a lawyers’ demonstration outside the Harare High Court last month.
The lawyers were protesting the arrest of two colleagues accused of obstructing the course of justice by contesting police evidence against clients detained for alleged involvement in petrol bombings, saying police evidence was faked and activists could not have been involved in at least one incident because at the time
they were already in jail.
Mugabe on Thursday praised the police for their ”dedication to duty” and said authorities would not tolerate strikes and other protests. – Sapa-AP, DPA