ECL, HH and their ministers of health have caused deaths in our hospitals: will they be prosecuted?
By Azwell Banda,
At the height of the campaigns leading up to the elections in August last year, the Patriotic Front (PF) got very used to mocking poor Zambians by brandishing bricks of kwachas at political rallies and meetings.
There are videos still in circulation of PF leaders dishing out money to entire audiences present at their meetings. The PF hosted a lavish, supper expensive modern national conference complete with the latest visual and sound systems. They bought a huge number of vehicles for their campaigns. Today, many of their leaders have been summoned before the police, Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), and the Drug Enforcement Commission (DEC) to explain the sources of their wealth.
As Edgar Changwa Lungu and his minions were publicly living it large and brandishing money like confetti at a mad porn trillionaire’s wedding, Zambians were dying in homes, clinics and hospitals from treatable and curable diseases because of poverty and shortage of drugs and medical equipment in government hospitals and clinics. These poor Zambians had no money to buy medicines or to access private clinics and hospitals. Our clinics and hospitals had been turned into providers of drug prescriptions and referral centres to private clinics and hospitals.
It is a perfectly legitimate suspicion that some of the loot brandished by the PF and ECL came from the Ministry of Health criminal money fountain. For every death that happened under Lungu because of corruption and stealing in the Ministry of Health, Lungu and his relevant minister of health are actually guilty of wilful murder; they willingly and knowingly facilitated corruption and theft in the Ministry of Health, fully aware this would cause deaths in our clinics and hospitals. To escape this fate, they themselves used to fly abroad to expensive modern clinics and hospitals when they fell sick.
Nowhere else was the theft, plunder, fraud, corruption and their deadly effects more visible, than in the Ministry of Health, when Edgar Chagwa Lungu was President of Zambia. We have heard about faulty ventilators purchased for our hospitals during the pandemic.
In all countries of the capitalist world, nothing presents easier opportunities to steal government money than the government medicines and medical equipment procurement processes. Trillions of monies are poured by governments into the coffers of private, greedy capitalists to buy medicines for public health institutions every day. This is an endless fountain of easy money, for thieves. No government in the world has invented a full proof method to prevent some of the government money being stolen.
In Zambia, even during the time of Kenneth Kaunda, there was theft, corruption and fraud in the Ministry of Health procurement processes. Kenneth Kaunda fought this most primitive, savage and cruel crime by putting in place all sorts of systems including the government’s countrywide health information systems, a Medical Stores, and hospital and clinic kits, but he still lost the fight to thieves and the corrupt.
After 1991, under Fredrick Chiluba and the full privatisation of the public health procurement processes, the Ministry of Health became the most lucrative ministry, for thieves of all kinds, as people scrambled to form companies to participate in buying medicines and health equipment for the government.
Presentation of false business documents, falsifying invoices, overquoting prices, sourcing the cheapest low-quality drugs and medical equipment, sourcing from fake manufacturers, and sourcing expired drugs and equipment are all some of the ways by which “supper profits” are reaped off, from the people of Zambia. Ultimately of course the documentation may well be perfectly done but no drugs and equipment are delivered; meanwhile the money is paid to such fake suppliers. Corruption is the oil that greases this system.
The value chains of this criminal enterprise involve large foreign drug manufacturers and international drug procurement companies, logistics companies and yes, even agents of donor funding. The Zambian share of this global network and value chains of cruel, savage and deadly capitalist thieves is actually quite small, compared to the massive global volume of moneys involved. Deaths from treatable and curable diseases in homes, clinics and hospitals are some of the end results of this deadly capitalist value chain.
Under the PF, we lived through a period when donors got so fade up with the rampant theft and corruption going on in the Ministry of Health that some of them withdrew their donor funding, pending improvements in the system. Lungu and his minions today are still free and enjoying some of the possible proceeds from such crimes, and are working hard to bounce back into government so that they could reconnect to their money feeding schemes in government. Edgar Chagwa Lungu and his ministers of health need to be arrested for suspected manslaughter and or murder, on many counts. Our clinics and hospitals have medical workers who know patients who have died because of lack of medicines and medical equipment.
Seven months after forming government, HH and his choir in the Ministry of Health have ‘patiently and methodically’ done very little to change the situation in the Ministry of Health, but instead have stopped, we are told, paying invoices and procuring drugs for six months in order to replace the PF feeding schemes ‘methodically’ largely with their own people, we suspect.
It must be born in mind that as long as medicines are bought on behalf of the government by private individuals and companies whose sole objective is to make money, HH and his choir are simply replacing one money making greedy bunch of potential thieves, fraudsters and corrupters, with another. Capitalism is private greed for money, thieving and corruption.
In the period HH and the UPND have been in government, any life lost at home, in clinics and in hospitals because drugs and appropriate medical equipment were not available in the public health sector are a direct result of the dereliction of duty and irresponsibility of HH and his Minister of Health; both are suspects of manslaughter or wilful murders. They too need to account for the deaths they have caused.
During the ongoing pandemic, as many Zambians have been gasping for breath and dying from pandemic, many good honest workers in the Ministry of Health know how ‘business people’, government officials and politicians are conniving with health officials to steal money, drugs and lifesaving equipment from our public health institutions. Some of this disgustingly cruel behaviour is perhaps intensifying under HH and his UPND government. Much of it was perfected and happened under ECL.
We see in the goings on in the Ministry of Health for a long time now what capitalism is: capitalism is a pathological craving and pursuit of money by all means necessary, including killing poor sick people in clinics and hospitals by starving them of drugs and medical equipment. ECL and HH and their respective ministers of health are culpable of manslaughter and or murder, as the cases may be, and they must be made to account, for every death they have caused by their criminal handling of the drugs and medical equipment procurement processes for our public health institutions. The records and evidence are in our homes, clinics, hospitals and cemeteries, of patients who have died because they could not access government medical help.
Our inability to cause ECL and HH and their public officials account for the needless and preventable deaths they have caused is a measure of how much we value our lives, and especially the lives of Zambian workers and the poor. This would also be to promote impunity. All human life is sacred, entitled to respect and reverence, and is superior to money. Elected politicians are paid by Zambians to save their lives, not to kill them.
Comments and exquisitely excellent insults welcome at: banda.azwell@gamil.com.