I sat across Senator Lizzie at the End Malaria Gala Dinner a week ago and watched as she was recognised for her outstanding work in the fight to end malaria in this country.
It was towards the end of the evening that speaker after speaker, including the adorable Princess of Africa, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, who paused during her performance, specifically recognised the former Minister of Health. Food for thought, I said to myself quietly, as the senator blushed away while appreciating the recognition. Later that night, she was called out to dance with the South African star, alongside many others who are champions of the fight against malaria.
Sadly, this notable success in the fight against malaria in this country and which has garnered the kingdom significant praise from across the continent, belongs to the past. It belongs to a previous life when Senator Lizzie was still the Minister of Health. It belongs to an era of Simon Kunene, before Lizzie Nkosi. But, more significantly, it belongs to a time when the health system in this country was very good, a bedrock of the country’s fine economy.
This was a period during which everything worked. We had good nurses, who are now being recruited to work outside the kingdom. We had very good hospitals that could be counted on to provide not just good service, but patients walked out in good health, having been attended to.
There were not many long queues back then, and if they were, it was either for a reason or addressed. There were medicines and drugs within each hospital. The health sector and all the clinics in the communities was, in fact, in good health. Everything worked. And yes, doctors were milking the system with their on-call allowances, but that is just neither here nor there. The point is: we had a vibrant health system that could be relied upon.
We had a vibrant system that beat COVID-19 when it would have been a catastrophe were we to experience a similar kind of pandemic nowadays, where people have woken up to realising how they must line their pockets by destroying the health system.
The health system has been slowly dismantled and destroyed with impunity while those who should do something have either been folding their hands or shrugging their shoulders. No one seems to want to take any decision, and those few who can be called upon to do so are exasperatingly dilly-dallying.
Meanwhile, people are dying, hospitals have run dry, nurses are staging sit-in protests and calling for help, and the health sector is nearing collapse.
Yet, on the other hand, for a good three years now, government has been burying its head in the sand, refusing to accept the truth staring it in the face. The lies that have been told have spread multiple times, and for all these years, there is no single person being held accountable for the scandal that is unfolding in this health sector.
Last week, the current Minister of Health, who took over at a time when those before him were being ostracised for failing the health sector, threw his hands in the air when MPs once more played to their script. MPs once again did the usual: throwing a tantrum typical of hapless politicians, by banging their fists on the table while demanding reports, reports that themselves are a political gimmick aimed at prolonging a problem.
These MPs have no solution whatsoever to what we are experiencing as our families die in their hands. They have no solution, even if the solution has been staring at them in the face this whole time they have been in office. They are refusing to look at their own faces in the mirror and do the right thing. They are looking away, clutching at straws, and choosing to look for scapegoats, something that has been happening for all these years. They are refusing to accept the truth, even when it is told to them.
Senator Lizzie Nkosi paid the price for telling the truth and was systematically removed as minister. But we are now two years into this crisis, and there is no single suggestion that a solution is on the way.
Her successor gave an incredibly brilliant analogy when confronted once more in Parliament of how difficult it is to solve this crisis:
“It is like herding sheep with lions,” he said, pleading for patience.
The problem with this is that the minister would be expected to delicately manage the task of herding sheep and lions. That is what he is paid to do. The minister did not come to this job to drink tea with biscuits and attend benchmarking exercises. He came to this job because it requires the requisite skill to solve a crisis like this one.
Which is why, one is convinced, after all these years and with all signs before him and his colleagues in Cabinet, it is clear that there is just no political will to solve this crisis.
This column has consistently pointed to the problem, and it has been proven right every single week, that the way we see this crisis and the corruption that is aiding and abating the shortage of drugs is exactly what is obtaining.
We said from the onset that the whole thing rests with how the problem was created in the first place. We pointed to the scandal of the forensic audit. We singled out the suspension of the procurement officers at the Ministry of Health as being part of a bigger scam to capture the procurement of medicines and drugs.
We raised the concern of the people being given the tender to conduct the forensic audit. We raised the concern that scapegoating Kareem Ashraf and Swazi Pharm was another scandal aimed at blindsiding us from where the problem lies.
We raised the argument that the report that had been put together was nothing but a shamfailing to provide the answers and, besides, containing false information that had been openly disputed. We pointed to the fact that the forensic audit report did not contain anything substantial except hearsay and rumour, which would only serve to peddle lies and half-truths.
Lastly, we have consistently challenged the PAC on this report and their handling of it. But no one wants to listen. No one cares for the truth. No one has even challenged the Auditor General to this point, because how can they, when there are benchmarking trips to the rest of the continent and India to contend with!
So, we sit and ask ourselves:
Who cares if there are no drugs in hospitals and shelves are running dry?
Who cares if the nurses are now telling us the only thing they can do is pray?
The truth that cannot be disputed at this point is that Lizzie Nkosi was recognised last week for her contribution to doing something great and positive for this country while she was minister. That she is now on the sidelines and branded the problem perhaps is the first realisation of where the wheels started to come off.
The only positive thing for us is that the truth has a way of coming out, just as Yvonne Chaka Chaka came from across the border to remind us of how good we once had it, and that there are good people who have built this sector.
