Zimbabwe’s Government will continue leaning on China for support to prop up the country’s ailing health sector as thousands of local health professionals migrate to Western countries seeking greener pastures.
Addressing a press conference soon after a Politburo meeting on Saturday, ZANU PF spokesperson Christopher Mutsvangwa said Health and Child Care minister, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga had presented a report that highlighted brain drain in the health sector.
Mutsvangwa said, unlike the Americans who preach democracy that cannot be eaten, China has been providing COVID-19 vaccines for Zimbabwe’s vaccination programme. Said Mutsvangwa:
We value this relationship and it has always been beneficial to us. China has been handy in that regard (health sector) and in investment.
What we have been trying to highlight to you is that China is an all-weather friend. We were not invited to the democratic sort of fiesta of the Americans in Washington, somehow because we created democracy which they denied.
We cannot eat the democracy of the Americans, but we definitely can benefit from the medical vaccines of the Chinese and save lives.
One relationship is very material, the other one is abstract and we would rather concentrate on the material one.
Mutsvangwa also accused Western countries of causing brain in the medical sector by luring the health professionals with salaries that Zimbabwe cannot match. He said:
When a crisis comes, they also have an ageing population, they come to recruit from Zimbabwe and because we are relatively poorer than them — because we were colonised and enslaved, we are not as rich as they are.
We train the best people, they come and snatch them and never want to compensate us for those people who we invest in so much through training, but they are now lured by better salaries because they have been neglectful to train their own personnel.
So, we are always at the receiving end of these people who want to lecture us about democracy and human rights, and all this.
Mutsvangwa said the Cabinet is working on addressing health professionals’ working conditions to stem brain drain.