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Newly appointed Minister of healthy and childcare Constatino Chiwenga has not paid attention to striking nurses who downed tools three months ago over poor working conditions and lack of PPEs in the healthy sector.
Some nurses working in the public health sector have been on strike for almost 61 days now demanding better salaries in USD and provision of personal protective equipment (PPEs).
In July government failed to pay the USD$72 covid-19 allowance pushing the nursers to stage a protest over poor remuneration and working conditions.
Earlier in August Mnangagwa appointed Chiwenga as the new healthy Minister and Nurses were in anticipation of a change and address to their demands hoping that the new Minister will ensure availability of PPEs , improve the conditions in hospitals.
However, Chiwenga has not yet attend to their concerns or address the Nurses current situation.
In a statement on Monday Zimbabwe Nurses Association said , “ We not with dismay that despite the recent appointments in the Ministry of health and child care, the issue of health workers withdrawing their labour has not been attended to.”
“In this regard , there has been no attempt to address workers demands as yet through formal engagement and we still wait for urgent intervention to end this impasse.”
The countries healthy sector is currently facing acute shortage of equipment to ensure healthy service providers are protected against COVID19, poor services and in most cases shortages of drugs.
“ We remain greatly disturbed by the none functioning of our healthy sector and people potentially needlessly dying in their homes , government has a duty to protect human life and guarantee healthy services to citizens.”
ZNA also noted with concern the removal of striking nurses from their payroll by the government .
In response to the strike government cut off nurses from their payroll and they did not receive their July salaries.
“ Whilst we received reports that some nurses who had been removed from their payroll have since been reinstated ,our information shows that there are those who are yet to receive their salaries , we urge the authorities to return back these on their payroll, “ said ZNA in a statement.
They added that as long as their labour demands are not met they won’t return back to work.
“ Until reasonable demands have been met , we maintain our positing NO USD, NO WORK ,NO PPE , NO WORK.”
Meanwhile , some time last week Chiwenga promised to resurrect the healthy sector attesting that a repeat of last time will not happen again.
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