Zimbabwe’s health system is dying and everyone can see it. After 45 years of ZANU PF rule, we are not moving forward but sliding backwards into a dark past where hospitals are just buildings with no medicine, no doctors, and no hope. The health sector is not just struggling. It is broken. Completely.
One picture tells the story of this collapse. It shows a patient lying in a hospital bed with a broken limb wrapped in cardboard and tape. That image has shocked people around the world. But in Zimbabwe, this has become normal. Our hospitals have no basic supplies. Patients are now being treated with whatever is available, even if that means using garbage as medical tools. This is what happens under a government that does not care.
Hospitals across the country are empty. There are no bandages. No painkillers. No equipment. No money. And no hope. Most of the doctors and nurses have already left the country. They are working in places where their skills are respected and their salaries mean something. What is left behind are clinics that do not function and hospitals that feel more like morgues. People go in hoping for help and come out in coffins.
Diseases that should be easy to treat are now killing people. The cholera outbreak of 2008 killed over 4000 people. We were told it was a disaster that should never happen again. But from 2023 to 2024, another 700 Zimbabweans died from the same disease. Nothing changed. Nothing improved. And the same failures repeated themselves because ZANU PF never learns and never listens.
It is not just about disease. It is about leadership. Or rather, the lack of it. The government gives very little money to health services. Instead, Zimbabwe survives on donations. Countries like the UK, Ireland, and Sweden are the ones keeping the lights on in our hospitals. Through UNICEF’s Health Development Fund, foreign donors pay for our maternal and child healthcare. It is foreign taxpayers who are saving Zimbabwean lives. Not our own government.
The numbers are painful. About 25 percent of our health budget comes from outside Zimbabwe. That is one in every four dollars. Most of this money is for specific areas like HIV, malaria, and maternal health. It does not even cover the entire health system. And now even this help is shrinking. The United States is cutting its support through PEPFAR. Once that money goes, the suffering will double.
Rural Zimbabwe is in even worse shape. People have to walk for hours to reach the nearest hospital. When they get there, there is no medicine. No nurses. No doctors. Some die on the way. Others die in the hospital waiting room. All of them are victims of a government that does not care enough to build a working health system.
This is not just about policy failure. It is about cruelty. It is about a leadership that watches its people suffer and does nothing. Under ZANU PF, health has become a luxury. The poor are left to die quietly while the rich fly to South Africa or Dubai for treatment.
Zimbabwe is not moving forward. It is going back to the Stone Age. Back to a time when people suffered in silence and died from simple illnesses. Wrapping broken bones in cardboard is not healthcare. It is horror. And unless something changes soon, that horror will spread further and deeper.
ZANU PF has failed the people. Our hospitals are empty. Our clinics are dying. And our future is bleeding out on a hospital bed covered in cardboard and shame.
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