LEST WE FORGET

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There is no denying that the health sector is one of the hardest hit by the current financial crisis facing government and that nurses have to bear the brunt of the frustrated patients, not to mention the relatives of those who have lost their loved ones unnecessarily.  

This irritation is rubbing off on the nurses who feel they deserve more attention from government, given the nature and scope of work which touches on people’s lives. As a result, our health workers have pitched a narrative that the previous government led by the late Barnabas Dlamini was better than the current one because they have had less engagement on the health challenges than they did with the former.

While we all agree that priority should start with saving people’s lives and not the welfare of former politicians, which seems to have jumped the queue of settling outstanding payments, we don’t think we can use the number of meetings the Health Ministry has held with nurses as a benchmark of performance in the 50 days that the new Cabinet has been in office.

We sympathise with their situation and we will never forget who created it. If the previous government hadn’t run this economy to its knees, the new Cabinet would have more time for meetings as opposed to running from pillar to post trying to find the money to purchase drugs and get the life-saving machinery up and running.

Numerous grievances presented by nurses to the previous Cabinet are well documented; among these was the scarcity of the former Health minister due to her frequent travels. This was a common trend with ministers and their subordinates; the scale of which was decried by the former Finance minister when he reported how an annual travel budget was exhausted in the first quarter of the year.
The previous Cabinet had a penchant for luxury cars and all things bling - hired cars included - but the new PM is buying no new car and ordered the return of the fleet that was mysteriously hired for Cabinet ministers at E3 600 per day, when ordinary rentals charge E700 a day for the same vehicles.
For some, the PM may not seem to be doing enough, or even soon enough, but we should be logical in our evaluation.  Public Sector Associations (PSAs) will obviously judge the PM and his Cabinet on the Cost of Living Adjustment (CoLA) demand. Some of us would rather judge him on how he first finds the money to ensure the country can afford it, lest he plunges us deeper into crisis, where government would not even be able to pay for salaries to begin with! Then he would certainly be worse than his predecessor. 

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