Fixing Healthcare, One Visit at a Time

Oscar J Jeke- Zim Now Writer

It Takes a President to Fix the Mess: “Dear Mr. President, please visit again soon, renovations depend on you.” Ministers and Citizens Are No Match to Propaganda. It says something extraordinary about the state of Zimbabwe’s public healthcare system that renovations at the country’s largest referral hospital began not after years of complaints, media reports, or ministerial outcries but mere hours after the President showed up.

Zimbabwe's public healthcare system is in crisis, a long-acknowledged truth underscored by dire underfunding, a debilitating brain drain, and a critical shortage of essential equipment and medicines. For years, the pleas of citizens and the concerns of even high-ranking officials seemed to fall on deaf ears, often met with dismissive rhetoric designed to paint a rosier picture.

Yet, a recent turn of events, catalyzed by a forthright minister and culminating in a presidential surprise visit, has starkly revealed the chasm between official pronouncements and the grim reality on the ground.

The plight of the average Zimbabwean seeking public healthcare is well-documented. Hospitals like Parirenyatwa and Sally Mugabe Central, once beacons of medical care, now grapple with dilapidated infrastructure, a severe lack of privacy due to bare curtain rails, and even collapsed heating systems in critical areas like maternity wards. The human cost of these systemic failures is immeasurable, contributing to Zimbabwe's unenviable position on the World Health Organisation's Health Workforce Support and Safeguards List.

For years, pleas from citizens, healthcare professionals, and even cabinet ministers have fallen on deaf ears. Instead of solutions, they’ve often been met with perfunctory reassurances or outright denial, as if propaganda could plaster over the gaping cracks in the nation’s hospitals. Months ago, Youth Empowerment Minister Tinomuda Machakaire visited a relative at a public hospital. What he saw—crumbling infrastructure, exhausted staff, and patients battling illness in sub-human conditions—shook him.

His resulting plea to President Emmerson Mnangagwa was both heartfelt and damning: “There is no substitute for seeing, listening, and understanding firsthand what our citizens are going through.”

It was a rare moment of candour from inside government, and the public responded with applause not just for Machakaire’s honesty, but for articulating what many experience daily. But that honesty was met with bureaucratic disdain. Deputy Health Minister Sleiman Kwidini, speaking in Parliament, casually dismissed the concerns. “People on social media always talk,” he said, before adding seemingly without irony that “our citizens are very happy with the service we are giving” and that the sector had performed “wonders” since 2018.

It was a tone-deaf response that revealed a deeper rot: a government more concerned with optics than outcomes, more focused on image than impact. Then the unexpected happened. President Mnangagwa, perhaps spurred by Machakaire’s words or simply moved to action, embarked on an unannounced inspection of Parirenyatwa Hospital, Sally Mugabe Hospital, and the NatPharm warehouse.

Presidential spokesperson George Charamba, writing under his "Jamwanda" persona on X, revealed the intent behind the visits: to bypass the filters of bureaucracy and public relations and confront the raw reality.

And the reality was grim—just as citizens and whistleblowers had long insisted. Hours after the President’s walk-through, renovations began. A refurbishment programme that had seemed implausible suddenly sprang to life. On social media, astonishment turned to cynicism. “Mnangagwa comes in the afternoon; in the evening, work begins,” one user noted. Whispers soon turned to questions: Who got the tenders? How were they awarded? Was the contractor, Prevail Group, already on site before the visit? No answers were given. Instead, suspicion mounted.

The abruptness of the refurbishments in a country where even purchasing bandages can require multiple signatures suggested not responsiveness, but stagecraft. Was the visit the beginning of change or the culmination of a carefully choreographed performance? This paradox—that it takes the personal intervention of the President to catalyse long-awaited improvements—reveals an uncomfortable truth about governance in Zimbabwe: institutional paralysis is so entrenched that only a direct command from the highest office can shift gears.

Ministries make noise but lack teeth. MPs debate, but few listen. And citizens? They endure. In effect, the President’s visit achieved in 24 hours what years of parliamentary debates, NGO reports, citizen petitions, and even ministerial pleas could not. That speed is both impressive and damning. Because the question that now looms large is: why should it take the President to fix what ministers and technocrats are paid to manage?

Machakaire’s plea was brave but brushed aside. Civil society concerns were drowned.