Zimbabwe - Africa’s paradise?
Zimbabwe has long been touted as Africa’s paradise and at first glance it is. Local business executives like to say “third world does not mean third rate in the various conferences that dot the annual business cycle” There are harrowing tales coming out the country though that make it sound like fiction from the stone age. There are stories of modern households cooking on firewood, the steady hum of generators becoming a way of life in a few of the houses in the affluent areas, while darkness is a norm in the rest of the country. School regularly talk about losing dozens of teacher at a time and so it goes on. None of the stories are more harrowing than those that come of the medical arena. In the immediate post independence period for about ten years, Zimbabwe was the envy of Africa. Today all that has changed.
An emergency takes place on a Sunday morning. The inefficient cell phone network means that the definition of an emergency has to change. A person who is about to collapse should ideally give a couple of hours notice otherwise they might die where they fall. The reason is simple: emergencies are not allowed anymore by the crumbling telecommunications system. A busy signal is far more likely to occur than the sighting of a soccer ball on a soccer pitch. When eventually, a report is made, whoever rushes to the scene of the accident has to hasten slowly because of the gaping potholes, fit to hide a baby giraffe, that now pock mark the streets of Harare, once the sunshine city of Africa. If you summon an ambulance, you’d better have cash on you otherwise ask to use the neighbour’s car. More often than not, the relatives of the victim do not have the cash because it is simply not available in the country and the next door neighbour does not have fuel because he parked his car a while back. There is no fuel in the country except for company cars.
By some miracle, the family and the patient make it to the hospital. By this time after several frustrating tries, it has been established that the only hospital with a working generator is a private one. There happens to be a country wide power outage and the government hospitals have run out of fuel for their generators. This is real life. So, on the advice of a relative or a doctor friend, it is off to the private hospital. On admission, the family is immediately required to pay over a billion Zimbabwe dollars. That is more or less the monthly salary for a middle manager in a company that pays its staff well. For some reason, emergencies target people who earn half that amount and so the mother of the patient pleads before a stoic hospital administrator who is employed to run a business. Human nature prevails and a promise to make good on the money in the morning or some sort of surety by end of day is elicited. The favourite form of surety is foreign currency which the family will of course pop over to the bank and fetch. Alas it is a Sunday and besides neither the mattress at home nor the bank has any foreign currency in it! An hour or so later, the nurse emerges from the emergency room to announce that the patient needs to move to Intensive care and the administrator whips out his scientific calculator (otherwise he cannot fit in all the zeros) and he immediately announces a further charge of $5 billion. The mother of the patient collapses on the spot while the uncle takes over. Phone calls are made to friends, relatives and bosses in that order. The school fees for the children and the grocery shopping and rent will have to wait. The children, school and landlord will have to understand that the family was faced with an emergency.
The hospital gives the family time to decide whether to risk transferring the patient to a government hospital because suddenly the power is back on or to stay. They call the ambulance people and they are told the ambulance will not make an appearance without someone having gone to their offices round the block to pay a cash sum of $300 million and the family must secure a doctor to receive the patient on arrival. The family do not know any doctors, they do not have the numbers of any doctor and the doctors are on strike for higher wages anyway! The mother collapses again and the family scold her for adding to every one’s stress. Nerves are frayed and this is taking place at reception in full view of the public. Private grief is not allowed in Zimbabwe. Public humiliation is. Human nature takes over and a junior doctor calls a mate who remembers his hippocratic oath and agrees to leave the school of medicine pub and receive this patient.
Money is borrowed and the ambulance duly arrives. At the government hospital the admissions lady, miserable at having been given the job to dwell with ‘township people,’ takes her time and asking questions in English like “next of kin” words that the poor people cannot understand. She sighs audibly, mutters under her breath and takes her sweet time attending to them, taking their $5000 million admission fee and sending them on their way half an hour later.
This is normal in today’s Zimbabwe. We have not spoken about the cost of prescription medicine, the state of the government hospitals and the unavailability of drugs. Just a day in the life of a person who has to rush a relative to hospital. We did not get the patients comments. They died before we could talk to them after writhing in pain for hours.
January 28th, 2008 14:08
In 1980, when Mugabe came to power, Rhodesia had a GDP per capita that was comparable to that of Malaysia. Today, Malaysia is hailed around the world as one of East Asia’s great economic success stories, and is a newly industrialized country that manufactures goods of all sorts. Yet, in 1980, Rhodesia had economic policies that were more business-friendly than those of Malaysia, and a civil service that was far more honest and efficient than Malaysia’s. Both nations are former British colonies, and have a public service modeled on that of Britain.
And yet we find the Zimbabwe of today to be nothing more than a mess, an economic shambles, a tinpot 3rd world disaster, a lost opportunity thanks to this Mr Robert Gabriel Mugabe esq. This could have been the paradise of Africa….