The industrial action began Tuesday countrywide amid revelations the doctors want to be paid in foreign currency instead of the local dollar that continues to shed value faster than any other currency on earth.
Zimbabwe Medical Doctors Association chairman Amon Siveregi told ZimOnline on Wednesday that doctors would not return to work until Presidnt Robert Mugabe’s cash-strapped government addressed their grievances.
I can confirm that all doctors at the country’s referral hospitals and centres are on strike since Tuesday, said Siveregi. We are demanding acceptable salaries but I can’t disclose to you what we have tabled before the government due to a confidentiality clause in our dealings.
Health Minister David Parirenyatwa said the government would look into the doctors’ grievances. As government we are always willing to look into their problems. We are in touch with them but I am sure they understand that we are aware of their plight, he said.
Zimbabwe’s doctors, among the best trained in Africa but probably the worst paid in the world, earn a basic salary of Z$680 per month. A standard loaf of bread costs $200 in once prosperous Zimbabwe that is under an agonising recession that critics blame on repression and mismanagement by Mugabe – charges the veteran leader denies.
A snap survey by ZimOnline reporters showed that worst hit by the doctors strike were the major state hospitals in Harare, Bulawayo and other major urban centres.
State hospitals are the source of health services for the majority of Zimbabweans but are barely functioning at the best of times due to an overload of HIV/AIDS cases made worse by severe shortages of doctors, nurses, drugs and equipment.
For those who rely on public hospitals, the latest doctors’ strike probably only serves to highlight the rot in Zimbabwe’s public health delivery system that was once lauded as one of the best in Africa but has virtually crumbled due to years of under-funding and mismanagement. – ZimOnline