{UAH} Allan/Pojim/WBK: Museveni visits Mulago and emerges alive (but not proud...) - Comment
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Museveni visits Mulago and emerges alive (but not proud...)
It has been an interesting but not happy two weeks for Uganda's beleaguered health sector. It all started with the characteristically mercurial President Yoweri Museveni sauntering into public hospitals unannounced and catching health workers and patients unawares.
Uganda watchers know well how large, elaborate and breath-taking his security detail is. So the last thing anyone sitting somewhere quietly doing his own thing, as some health workers are reported to have been doing, would expect is to see Museveni walking quietly past them.
According to reports, at Mulago, Uganda's main national referral hospital, which has long been in an advanced stage of dilapidation, the few doctors and nurses on the wards, started scampering in different directions, not sure how to react or what to say to the president.
As for the hospital's top managers, the media had a field day, relating how Museveni had not given them time to have the facility cleaned up and the patients to be "organised" in preparation for his visit.
In the past he has done so, allowing them to do general cleaning and beautification in the same manner his own government does when someone important is coming to visit. As he went about looking here and there, including at the toilets, he apparently also listened intently as patients who were lying on beds and under them, or out in the corridors and on the stairs; some, needing attention but not getting it, poured their hearts out to him.
We are yet to get an official account of what he made of the place, and how he felt while there. However, anyone who is familiar with Mulago's general circumstances would not imagine he left feeling proud that his government has done everything possible to ensure that the hospital runs as expected of a health facility.
Some days after his Mulago experience, Museveni sneaked into Naguru Hospital in another of Kampala's suburbs, arriving at 8am and catching health workers turning up late. There, too, patients and health workers were taken by surprise.
According to reports, among the things he did while there was to sit among and speak to some patients who were waiting to be attended to, asking questions and listening to their gripes about this and that.
The media loves this sort of thing, and have milked the visits to the maximum, compounding the sense of embarrassment the health workers must have felt at being caught off-guard by none other than the country's chief executive. And just before everyone could move on as we always do after titillating news has run its course, reports emerged about the only radiotherapy machine at the Uganda Cancer Institute, also located at Mulago Hospital, breaking down.
It was time to flog the health sector some more. And then came news that the only x-ray machine at Butabika Hospital, Uganda's only mental health referral facility, had broken down some time ago, and that Masaka Hospital's had been out of service much longer.
With the exception of the period it takes to repair broken-down equipment in Uganda and the trouble through which those responsible for fixing it have to go to get it done, there is nothing necessarily exciting about medical equipment ceasing to function properly. Which is why the stories about the x-ray machines would have not attracted that much attention.
However, they happened to be "dead" at the same time as the cancer machine about which commentators and reporters knew lamentably little in terms of what it is used for and how it works. Soon enough, the government was being boxed around the ears for neglecting to fix the machine quickly or even buying a new, modern one, which left thousands of cancer patients "stranded," and apparently forced others to "go home and die."
By the time it became clear that the machine's death was not the end of the world for cancer patients and that radiotherapy was only one of several anti-cancer measures, the chorus of condemnation had reached fever pitch.
It became worse for the government and a little better for the health sector when news broke that the election victory celebration staged by the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement, of which President Museveni is chairman, had cost vast sums of money.
Such were the insults thrown at the government, the NRM, and those that lead them for choosing to binge on cakes and other eats and assorted drinks at the same time as the country's health facilities cannot provide decent care, that one ought not to repeat them in a family newspaper.
Of course, the NRM has every right to throw a party to celebrate their victory, and no one should really hold that against them. And in planning the victory party, they would have had no idea that it would coincide with such bad news and that therefore, the money they would have spent would come under such scrutiny.
Still, that its leadership would in principle spend vast amounts on partying while the health sector collapses around them as it has been doing over the past 30 years they have been in power is astounding.
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com
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