PUBLIC HEALTHCARE SYSTEM CRUMBLING

Sir,
 
If it is not a question of affordability of the means through which the masses can and should be venting their frustrations, it is the State’s hostility regarding free speech and freedom of expression. You dare not speak your mind because of the fear of being profiled and thereafter blacklisted thus thrusting innocent children into the crosshairs of a vindictive political system that will ensure they do net access things like scholarships and other services funded by the taxpayer.

Silence

Yet it is this forced silence that the state, while quietly building up a military machine to crush anticipated dissent, uses to project a veneer of a peaceful nation and a tranquil environment that otherwise is further from the truth. People are silent out of fear not that they are happy with their circumstances, a fact that is probably known to the leadership hence its fixation with free spending on security forces. As it were the subject of a failing healthcare sector should be keeping everyone of us awake at night because the next time you go to hospital might be the last mile you will walk irrespective that you might have been suffering from the common flu.  Some patients have taken to arriving the previous evening in order to be at the head of these queues. This is prevalent on Fridays when people, usually the elderly, suffering from hypertension are herded like cattle to the dip tanks. Those who do not camp overnight at the hospital usually start flowing in at around 3am and, like those camping overnight at the hospital, are also denied a proper night’s rest.

Imagine

You can imagine that by the time they are attended to – tired from a lack of proper rest/sleep - their BP is sky-rocketing, which might easily lead to the prescription of wrong medication. Even worse, at the end of a very long day, it is common to be informed at the dispensary that the drugs/medication prescribed are out of stock and can be obtained, at cost to the patient, from pharmacies. The challenges faced by the public healthcare delivery system are not just flashes in the pan but are a permanent feature. Not a year goes by without an acute shortage of drugs, personnel, etc, being experienced in public health facilities. Blinded by its concomitant obsession of First World status, government has mistakenly put all its efforts in constructing aesthetically attractive health facilities without providing for adequate medical personnel and medicines/drugs. It’s as if the buildings are the pancreas to the ailments afflicting patients.

Dysfunctional

The dysfunctional public health delivery system is but a microcosm of massive service delivery challenges faced by the nation while government is focused on the needs and desires of the minority in leadership and the well heeled cronies in tow. In this scheme of things the people are always an afterthought hence invariably interventions seeking to better the lives of the ordinary folk come from external sources while massive domestic resources are focused on building a military machine to maintain the so-called peace as well as at uneconomical projects, which are social misfits given the levels of poverty in the country. If government was people driven its focus should be on education, agriculture and healthcare, which are the primary catalysts for the trajectory towards achieving first world status, not wasteful projects.

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