The state of the hospital has become a metaphor for a country which is slowly dying from neglect Photo: AP
Life And Death A Matter Of Cash Withdrawals In Zimbabwe's crumbling Hospitals -- The Telegraph
Bensen Mambo, a 40-year-old accountant, roamed the corridors of Harare's biggest hospital, occasionally stopping, moaning quietly, and waving his hands in the air when his dilemma became too much to bear.
His strange behaviour hardly seemed out of place in Parirenyatwa Hospital. Once it was Zimbabwe's showpiece teaching hospital with 1,000 beds - but now it is a shell of a building, filthy, crumbling, and mostly empty.
It has almost no drugs or working equipment, and the handful of doctors who have not fled abroad have pretty much given up trying to treat the trickle of patients who still come. A blood trail from an accident victim meandered from beneath a wheeled stretcher, in a ward whose plaster walls were crumbling. Patients gazed at the ceiling in a deathly silence.
Mr Mambo's wife Mary was one of them, diagnosed with a kidney ailment and in desperate need of treatment which he could easily afford.
But in the cruel and surreal world of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe the devoted husband could not withdraw his savings from the bank in time to pay doctors for the care that could have saved her life.
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My Comment: What I read from this story is the following ..... the people of Zimbabwe are now too sick (and weak from hunger) to rebel against Mugabe and his thugs.