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Doctors’ strike: Pinda loses the healing touch

Saturday February 04 2012
elsie

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report.

Tanzanian medical staff have been striking for about a week now, a strike that everyone hopes will be resolved soon. There are a few professions, life-affirming vocations, that I don’t think should be interrupted by concerns with money. Healers of all stripes fall into that category. However, in this case, let us admit that as a society we simply haven’t given our public health system the respect it deserves, let alone our doctors. Strike they must, and their grievances are valid.

The hours are long, the work is demanding, the pay is mildly insulting, and the politicians are trying to sweep this whole problem under the rug even as they award themselves fat sitting allowances in parliament. It has also been revealing in that for once, Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda has been caught on the back foot: The doctors are not willing to be talked out of their grievances.

The trouble with Mr Pinda is that he is in possession of an eminently reasonable public persona that he wields in service of the current administration. It might be that craggy no-nonsense face of his that suggests you should trust him. It might be that perpetually relaxed body language that conveys that not only has he seen all the shenanigans that the government of Tanzania gets up to, but that he knows how to navigate its treacherous seas. Since he came into office, we have watched him apply a soothing balm of concern to just about every labour action. Civil servants, railway workers, teachers, industrialists, you name it; many tempers have been handily defused by his “I’m just a farmer’s son” charm. But it seems that he may have met his match this year. The divide between the words and stated intentions of this administration and its actions has grown into a chasm way too big for one prime minister to bridge.

This is unfortunate for everyone concerned, but there is no denying that the Fourth Administration is now servicing its debt to the public. They have been racking up disappointment after disappointment for a couple of years now, and it has pent up and turned into something stronger. The last thing Tanzanians want to hear when loved ones are not getting care at the National Hospital is that politicians in their employ are about to award themselves an even bigger slice of our extremely slim national budget cake.

Propaganda

Why are our politicians, normally astute in the ways of calming the masses with faux-socialist propaganda, ignoring the danger signs? And how could PM Pinda possibly go from coaxing doctors to dialogue one day to announcing increased MP sitting allowances the next? This latest tension created by our parliamentarians’ arrogant abuse of their powers is wearing hard on everybody. The fact that the president has publicly stated his support for the increase in MPs’ sitting allowances has only made matters worse, not better.

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This administration has survived scandals that would have broken the spirit of a more sensible government. A large part of the survival tactic has been the surprisingly successful Kikwete-Pinda pairing. It has worked well for them, and for us as a country. The one man has gravitas to compensate for the other’s playful nature, the one hangs about and helps run the country while the other specialises in collecting air miles and the uniquely African sport of International Donor Tickling. The one can be trusted to show up to try to convince us that the government is doing all it can, even when the evidence points to the contrary. But the actions of the government with regards to the doctors’ strike and the sitting allowances has allowed one of those rare and irrefutable truths to come out: Our leadership is embarrassingly uninterested in its public.

A lot has been written about political will and whether our politicians have enough of it to effect changes. Well, it takes a lot of courage and daring, I think, to ignore the suffering of thousands of Tanzanians while plotting how to fatten your own bank account. It isn’t the political will that we are hoping for, but at least now on we can admit that our politicians are highly motivated — on their own behalf. Mizengo Pinda may have been one of the last repositories of faith in the ancient regime. The fact that this time around, there will be no meeting with the prime minister to talk things through is a vote of no confidence. If the government cannot pretend to care about crucial matters any more, then civilians need not pretend to be polite about their frustration either.

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