Former Finance Minister Tendai Biti, who is the Harare East legislator (MDC Alliance), says the country’s key political leaders should learn lessons from their inability to travel abroad for treatment for COVID-19.
Biti said President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his ministers are now facing the consequences of running down the country’s health system, yet the effects of the pandemic could have been partially averted if they had prioritised the country’s health delivery system. The NewsHawks quote Biti as saying:
President Emmerson Mnangagwa, his ministers and their cronies are marooned locally, they can’t go to South Africa, Singapore and China, but they have destroyed hospitals; now facing the consequences.
They should have invested in health, but they didn’t, hence people are dying.
Some of these fatalities would have been avoided if we had a functioning healthcare system, hospitals, doctors, nurses, drugs and equipment.
We don’t have all the basics; the system is a shell. That’s why people are dying like this. We could have partially avoided this situation.
COVID-19 has already claimed the lives of three cabinet ministers, that is, Perrance Shiri (Agriculture), Sibusiso Moyo (Foreign Affairs) and Joel Biggie Matiza (Transport).
Manicaland Provincial Affairs and Devolution Minister Ellen Gwaradzimba and military commander, Brigadier-General Collin Moyo (Retired) also succumbed to the respiratory disease this month.
