President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said his administration will continue to invest in the health sector to provide quality and affordable healthcare to all citizens as well as to be ready for the next pandemic after the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Speaking to journalists in an interview on the sidelines of the just-ended African Union Extraordinary Heads of States and Governments on Industrialisation and Economic Transformation in Niamey, Niger, Mnangagwa said sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the country’s detractors about two decades ago have negatively impacted Zimbabwe’s health sector. He said:
The health sector back home has suffered particularly as a result of sanctions, we have had two decades of sanctions and our health coverage had gone down.
Now the attack, which came to Zimbabwe and the rest of the world through COVID-19 has given us the awakening bell to say ‘please wake up, you will never know when the next pandemic is coming, prepare yourself’.
So, we are now focusing on making sure that our health sector is attended to. If you look at the budget, we have upped drastically our investment in the health sector because we feel when COVID-19 came about, Zimbabwe was isolated.
We never received any significant amounts from outside, we had to depend on our own domestic resources, we diverted funds from other projects to make sure we protected our people and at the end of the day, Zimbabwe did actually very well in the region and perhaps in the whole continent in terms of mitigating the impact of COVID-19. We’re not going to stop at that.
We’re not going to stop there; we are making sure that we are going to do anything possible to prepare for any pandemic that may come. But also, it’s good to have our people have the best health service system.
Finance and Economic Development Minister Mthuli Ncube allocated 11 percent of the $4.5 trillion 2023 national budget to the health sector.
However, local health experts say the$473.8 billion budget allocation towards the provision of health care services is inadequate. | The Sunday News