A picture of a makeshift wheelchair at Parirenyatwa Hospital has caused a commotion on social media with some saying the atmosphere at local hospitals was worsening the condition of patients.
Standard wheelchairs cost about R6 000, about US$366.50.
The pictures were shared by Hopewell Chin’ono, an award-winning Zimbabwean journalist and documentary filmmaker who attributed the sore sight to the government’s failure to fund the health sector. Reads a post seen by Pindula News:
This is a wheelchair at what is supposed to be Zimbabwe’s most modern public hospital, Parirenyatwa!
The regime has failed to buy just wheelchairs.The same hospital is now only doing emergency treatment, not elective (scheduled) treatment.
The wheels have literally come off, all because of the LOOTING of public funds.
They threaten me with jail for exposing this rot!
The pictures surface amid a controversy caused by remarks by South African medical doctor, Phophi Ramathuba, who told a bedridden Zimbabwean patient that Zimbabweans ought to get treatment in their own country.
Zimbabwe’s health sector has been collapsing in the last two decades with observers attributing the collapse to the looting of public funds by “heartless” politicians who have “nothing to lose” as they get medical attention abroad.
In 2021, President Emmerson Mnangagwa fired then Health Minister,Dr Obadiah Moyo for corruption involving USD60 million.
Political elites who have received criticism include Vice President ConstantinoChiwenga who doubles as the Minister of Health and Child Care. He spent the good part of 2020 in South African, Indian and Chinese hospitals.
The late former president Robert Mugabe used to get medical attention in Singapore.
