Bitter pill: Govt caves in to doctors after unnecessary posturing and stonewalling

The Tanzania government has finally caved in to the demands of striking doctors in a move that has once again shown the futility of unnecessary grandstanding against legitimate claims of rights long denied.

When their demands first came to the attention of the authorities, the response was to tell them they could not strike and those who dared to do so would face dismissal; the authorities even promised to call in medics from the armed forces to take their places. In due course, we indeed saw soldiers in uniform taking up positions at the main hospital in Dar es Salaam, but it was all for show.

It is hard to believe that the military medical personnel had all this time been sitting idle in their hospitals waiting for their government counterparts to strike so they could take their places. That would have meant that we had a corps of paid and competent medical personnel seriously underutilised in a country where one doctor serves tens of thousands of citizens!

There was also the irritant of the proposed hike in parliamentary allowances, which sat very badly with the refusal to accede to the doctors’ demands. This was another demonstration of the shameless selfishness of our politicians, to be observed in most African countries, where a political post is a licence to loot the Treasury.

Lessons

That the government has now changed tack and accepted the doctors’ demands is commendable, albeit unnecessarily delayed because of pointless posturing and stonewalling. One hopes this episode will provide those in government with valuable lessons for the future. My worry is that the government has shown a singular lack of capacity to learn from its own mistakes, and that’s why it seems to be stumbling from gaffe to gaffe.

Indeed, they will soon need to put those lessons to use. Now that the doctors have had their way, other cadres are going to follow suit and demand their own. No one can stop them, for what is good for the goose will have to be good for the gander. So expect the teachers to be next, and after that the floodgates will have been thrown wide open. Where will it all end?

We are already running the risk of appearing like wrangling cabals fighting over spoils accruing from looting the country, while the rightful owners of the country, the people, look on uncomprehending. It also looks like whoever can shout loudest and threaten most ominously will carry the day, while whoever plays softball and sounds conciliatory will get the short end of the stick.

It is inelegant and it definitely is not meant to be this way. There should be a mechanism through which all the salaries, allowances and other emoluments and perks will be fixed and reviewed from time to time. A salaries and emoluments commission would be in order, much in the same vein as the so-called Adu Commission soon after Independence.

To continue to allow each group to negotiate its own terms in a confrontational way wherein the preferred weapon is the threat of the repercussions likely to arise as a result of that particular group laying down tools, could look like blackmail. If doctors strike, people will die. If teachers strike, children will not learn, including future doctors, so people will die. If our cops strike, public peace will be jeopardised and people will die. If the army strikes, it’s a mutiny and people will die. And so on and so forth.

As a result of all these comings and goings, at the end of all the wrangling and arm twisting in a dialogue of the deaf, two senior officials of the Ministry of Health — the permanent secretary and chief medical officer — have been suspended, no doubt as sacrificial lambs to atone for the sins of their political principals whose dillydallying, stonewalling and duplicity caused the problem in the first place.