Zimbabwe’s Vice President who also doubles as the country’s Health Minister Constantino Chiwenga while touring United Bulawayo Hospitals told the people he was touring with that his ministry was working on reviving 13 pharmaceutical companies that closed down because of the economic turmoil, the Chronicle reports.
Promised Chiwenga:
We are going to be opening all 13 pharmaceutical companies that were closed down. We are going to revamp all those facilities which had gone to waste. We are now going to revamp that area of equipment and drug manufacturing here in Zimbabwe. When we buy from outside Zimbabwe what we are actually doing is that the meagre foreign currency, which we are earning, is lost.
Chiwenga also said Government hospitals were now required to seek authority from the ministry to procure consumables and medical sundries from outside the country:
That will be a thing of the past and it must never be repeated. We don’t want a situation where some equipment would have been purchased from another country and then upon arrival, we discover that it does suit our environment yet money would have been wasted. That has to stop.
He then urged medical practitioners to stop shunning the country and said we need to build the country together and said our medical practitioners in foreign countries are told you are here for money when they complain:
We should not shun our own country because if we do so no one will develop it. I have seen our own specialists in foreign hospitals whenever they see wrong things being done at those institutions, they are not allowed to say anything and they are told ‘shut up and you did not come here to teach us; you are here for money.
While at the hospital VP Chiwenga also narrated how doctors at the hospital saved him when his appendix ruptured some 3 decades ago.
More: Chronicle