SONA needed more numbers

DUDZAI MUREYI

Gird your loins, oh ye members of the ninth Parliament of Zimbabwe! You’re going to be a busy lot, given the 32 prospective bills, amendments and ratifications on your agenda, as described in the President’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Tuesday. Those that have taken a shine to the habit of walking out of Parliament mid-session, had best procure comfortable footwear.

This being the new President’s first State of the Nation Address since being inaugurated, it had the unique opportunity to quantify the progress made since November 2017 as well as the still outstanding problems. Numbers attached to the activities between November and now (and they have been several of these activities actually), in my view, would have added some gravitas to the SONA, they would have been a sign of seriousness and they would have fuelled our optimism, something we can never have too much of. It is appreciated that the SONA is a high-level presentation, which cannot possibly go into statistical detail about the goings on in every economic sector without taking hours to deliver, but there are some major questions on everyone’s lips. Issues of life preservation and health system resilience, of inflation of basic food commodity prices and of livelihoods, are literally the stuff of life and hearing numbers, no matter how dire, coming out of the SONA, may have inspired confidence in how in touch the government is with the things that keep us up at night.

I paid attention to the SONA with an ear vigilant to anything relevant to the health sector, obviously. If I’m being frank, I missed the part where the actual state of the nation was described. Our problems were not quantified. But then again, to be fair, the state of the nation and in particular the state of the health sector, is quite apparent and very few need to be educated on this – medication shortages, diarrhoeal disease outbreaks, under-equipped health facilities, healthcare staff strikes require no spokesperson. What ended up capturing my interest are the proposals and the calls to action going forward; public-private partnerships, forex disbursements for manufacturers and importers (one assumes healthcare products are included herein), efficient service delivery, infrastructure modernisation, enabling reforms, new legislative frameworks and work culture reorientation. All these were articulated as future plans and appeals, very reminiscent of election manifestos and therefore, unable to inspire me to immediately sit up straight with interest. I am personally eager though, to subject the new government’s promises to a sincerity stress test. As we all should.

Let’s talk about the number, 500 million.

The foreign exchange facilities altogether worth 500 million dollars that have been already negotiated, some of the money from which is set to be disbursed this week, provide a reason to hope, particularly for those that have heard pharmaceutical importing businesses ascribing the systemic medicine shortages to the scarcity of forex. (I write this from a position of assuming that this is already money in the bag). To state the painfully obvious, in the face of scarcity, efficiency is imperative. Every dime of that 500 million must break its back working and it must be seen doing so in order to build the scarcest resource of all: confidence in our new government. So, I must ask on behalf of medicine consumers: What checks and balances are there to ensure that money claimed from the Central bank to pay for pharmaceutical imports does exactly this and nothing else? Can these checks be gamed? Does the Central bank pay suppliers directly on behalf of drug importers? Is there a priority list of which medicines are paid for first? (some medicines are more profitable to wholesalers and retailers than others, but they are not strictly life-saving). What penalties await those that are unable to account for the funds received from the Reserve Bank under the pretext of importing medicines? I focus on medicines because being a pharmacist, that is my bias, but the same questions can be raised for any commodity that require RBZ interventions to be procured.

After listening to the SONA, I don’t know much more about the state of the health sector or the nation than I did before I listened to it. It was more of a high-level plan of action. But that’s okay, because it now provides a benchmark against which future progress can be measured. Already looking forward to the next one.

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