By Patrick Guramatunhu- “I want to thank you all for your prayers. Those prayers made me to survive,” a reinvigorated VP Chiwenga told his audience.
“Since I started falling sick in October last year, there were not many who thought I would heal completely. There were not many who thought I would be standing before you like this.
“The sickness is called idiopathic oesophageal stricture. It means that you cannot take in food and also you cannot even vomit. It involves blocking of the oesophagus and I spent a lot of time in the intensive care unit.”
VP Chiwenga thanked President Emmerson Mnangagwa for facilitating his treatment in China.
Yes, VP Chiwenga, you must thank President Mnangagwa and your fellow Joint Operation Command, junta behind the Zanu PF dictatorship, members who staged the November 2017 coup and secured you lot’s strangle hold on power and your position as a member of the country’s exclusive ruling elite. Whilst members of the ruling elite have continued to enjoy five-star health care service the ordinary Zimbabweans have no access to even the most basic health care service.
It is no secret that the country’s health care, same as education and all the other basic services, had all but collapsed years ago due to decades of poor funding. The collapsing local health care did not bother the ruling elite because they preferred to shop for their health care needs up market as with everything else; money was not a problem for them.
The ruling elite’s extravagance knew no limits, it normal for them to travel half way round the world for route health care checks. In 2012 the President Robert Mugabe traveled to Singapore eight times for routine eye test, each trip costed US$3 million plus.
A few years later his daughter, Bona, too travelled to the Far East for the birth of his grand son, the whole palaver costed US$ 10 million, at least! All this money was public money taken away from the country’s own health care services and thus accelerated the collapse of local health service.
VP Chiwenga attended last Tuesday’s cabinet meeting and must have learnt of the cabinet’s decision to summarily sacked doctors for daring to demand a living wage and not the pittance US$40 per month. Indeed, it was VP Chiwenga who fired the nurses early this year for demanding a living wage.
The sacking of the doctors was just the coup de grace to the health care service; it is now all but dead.
With no doctors, no nurses, no working equipment, no medicine, no water, no electricity, no food, no fuel, etc., etc. it is no surprise that the death toll in Zimbabwe soaring up. Zanu PF committed mass murders in the Gukurahundi massacre, the regime is guilty of yet another massacre, a “soft genocide” as some people are calling it. Zimbabweans are dying like flies of all manner of easily treatable diseases and ailments including malaria, high blood pressure, etc.
40 years of this corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical Zanu PF rule has turned the clock back 300 years plus for the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans dying of poverty, hunger, disease and dumb anguish. The whole nation is being sacrificed to feed the insatiable greed for power and wealth of the ruling elite whose arrogant indifference to the suffering and deaths of others is insufferable.
“We are the most educated country in Africa, but I do not understand what has become of the young people . . . Every day, they want to make rich pickings, with little sweat,” said VP Chiwenga of the striking doctors.
“Where is that spirit coming from?
“Let us put the interests of our country first and have a unity of purpose. That is the Zimbabwe we want.”
A Zimbabwe in which the local public health care services is all but dead and hundreds of thousands are suffering and hundred are dying everyday of curable diseases is NOT the Zimbabwe we, the ordinary people, want.
Zanu PF blatantly rigged last year’s elections, just as it has done repeatedly for the last 38 years, and thus denied us, the ordinary people, a meaningful say in the governance of the country, a meaningful say in what we want.
The Zanu PF dictatorship has brought heartbreaking suffering and deaths to millions of Zimbabweans. The economic situation in Zimbabwe is unsustainable and must be dismantled as a matter of urgency.
This Zanu PF regime is illegitimate and must step down to allowed the nation the political time and space to finally implement the democratic reforms necessarily for free, fair and credible elections.
The cup is full and overflowing; enough is enough. Zimbabwe needs meaningful political change and to end the tragic human suffering brought about by the 40 years of corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF rule.