Africa-Press – Zimbabwe. FOR years, the crisis in Zimbabwe’s health sector has been bemoaned in passing — often treated as a symptom of a wider economic collapse.
Yet, as recent revelations show, the malaise runs much deeper.
The country’s once-proud medical system has not merely declined; it has disintegrated into a relic of its former self.
This grim truth was laid bare by veteran surgeon and church leader Matthew Wazara during the ongoing 4th edition of the In Conversation Ideas Festival in Nyanga.
Presenting a paper titled Building Blocks of a Healthy Nation, Wazara delivered a sobering assessment: Zimbabwe has fallen from operating one of Africa’s strongest and most innovative medical systems to becoming a training ground crippled by underfunding, obsolete infrastructure and chronic shortages of medicines.
His remarks pierced through years of polite denial and bureaucratic excuses.
The calamity is not a passing crisis: it is structural, systemic and has been long in the making.
For decades, the health system has survived on inertia, patched together by the resilience of professionals rather than the foresight of policymakers.
Wazara’s reflections expose the consequences of years of neglect, misplaced priorities and policy decay.
What once functioned as a regional model of excellence is now a cautionary tale of institutional collapse.
At the heart of the problem is the continued reliance on an outdated health delivery model, one that dates back to the 1950s and 1960s — a time when colonial priorities determined who received care and who did not.
Ironically, decades after independence, Zimbabwe’s health system still bears the DNA of that antiquated structure.
It was designed for a smaller, segregated population, not the 15 million citizens who now depend on it.
The population has grown exponentially, but infrastructure has not.
Hospitals are overcrowded, rural clinics under-equipped and health workers overstretched and underpaid.
The result is a widening gap between public need and institutional capacity, a gap that claims lives quietly every day.
Modern healthcare depends on accurate data, efficient logistics and robust public investment.
Yet Zimbabwe’s facilities are still run using outmoded equipment and outdated information systems, some tracing back to the pre-independence era.
Without reliable data, effective planning is impossible.
Without modern tools, even the most skilled doctors are reduced to improvisers in a broken system.
The consequences are tragic and predictable: medieval diseases resurge, maternal and infant mortalities remain stubbornly high and the poor bear the brunt.
For the majority, who cannot afford private care or cross-border treatment, illness often becomes a death sentence.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy lies in how normalised the dysfunction has become.
Decades of decay have numbed public conscience; outrage has been replaced by resignation.
Doctors’ strikes, drug shortages and hospital closures no longer shock — they are simply part of life in Zimbabwe.
And yet, as Wazara’s remarks remind us, it was not always so.
Zimbabwe once stood as a regional leader in healthcare, producing doctors and nurses who went on to serve across Africa and beyond.
The foundations of excellence are still there, buried beneath layers of neglect and corruption, but not beyond recovery.
Rebuilding will require more than money.
It demands political will, vision and a moral commitment to treat healthcare not as a privilege, but as a right.
It means investing in people and infrastructure, modernising systems and restoring dignity to the profession.
For a nation that once prided itself in its human capital, the collapse of the health sector is more than an administrative failure, it is a moral indictment.
Zimbabwe must rediscover the courage to heal itself, starting with the truth that a healthy nation cannot be built on broken foundations.
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