Gridlock

A friend went to the Parirenyatwa Hospital last night with his sick brother and it took them four hours to get attention. There seemed to be only one doctor on duty to attend to scores of patients. The nurses seemed so stressed by overwork that they could not manage basic civilities towards those waiting. An old man was asked to pay $10 for a card and when he clearly did not have it he was told to stand aside. Next! While they were waiting a man came in with a snake bite and he also had to wait four hours with a snake bite! The word emergency is losing its meaning, just as the word abnormal lost it long ago. The abnormal has now become the normal and emergencies are no longer emergencies.

In the prison service there is a report out this week that police say they do not have the money to feed the people they arrest and put in cells. Senior Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena said that if arrested people are not given food by relatives or sympathetic policemen, paying for food out of their own pockets, detainees will go hungry. He said the police force received less than 10% of the funds they requested in the last budget and it is disintegrating fast. This is affecting the number of prosecutors, magistrates and others servicing the courts so there are long delays in cases coming to trial.

And the Ministry of Education allocation amounts to $1 per child at school per month. All this is happening in a country rich in resources. In Botswana they have diamonds and little else. But they have managed to develop their poor country into a stable economy. The newly discovered diamond fields in our country are just one of the many natural resources that we abound it.

But what is the use of going on in this vein? Is anyone who can do anything about it listening? They have no need of courts because they are answerable to no one. They have no need of our hospitals. They can go to private clinics or fly off to South Africa. Their children will not want for a sound education.

So we have a national gridlock, mirrored in the gridlock in our government where things dont move. I am told that there is a culture in South Africa where people immediately protest if they perceive an injustice. Students will gather in their hundreds if denied some service they expect and the police will not come in to harass them. If they do they too may be the object of student attention. And it is not just students. Any group of people will rise any time to protest. But in our country the slightest protest, the slightest exercise of the rights of citizens won with such cost in 1980, is met by overwhelming and brutal force. There is a culture of fear and that is the way the authorities want it to be.

I once read somewhere that the French Revolution took place not because people were desperate but because they were just beginning to see a way out of their desperation. The important thing for despots is to keep people so stressed that they have no energy left to think of anything but their next meal. It means you can prolong your rule indefinitely. Meanwhile the country remains gridlocked.