Mugabe grandson born overseas at huge cost in treasure and human lives

There are reports that Mugabe,s daughter Bona had a baby boy. He must be the most expensive baby to the nation, given the nation,s present financial difficulties!

Only last week Health Minister, David Parirenyatwa, condemned the maternity ward at Chiredzi General Hospital as "unsafe" because it is overcrowded, for one thing. The ward was built by the whites in 1967 to accommodate a few patients and now it is so overcrowded many patients have to sleep on the floor.

Years of poor funding has left the country's health service in a terrible, terrible state.

No one is suggesting that Mugabe and his daughter should not seek the best health services; every parent out there would want the best for themselves and their children. What is unacceptable here is Mugabe is seeking the very best for his family at PUBLIC EXPENSE. Public funds that should be used to ensure Chiredzi General Hospital maternity ward is safe for the hundreds of thousands of expectant mothers and their new born babies using the ward every year; are used instead to pay for extravagant luxuries of one mother and child.

Chiredzi General Hospital, like most other hospitals up and down the land is starved of funds it will not have enough incubators (if it has any at all). The money spent on Bona and Grace,s and their usual entourage of hangers-on on this trip alone will probably buy enough incubators for all the hospitals and clinics in Zimbabwe. So thousands of babies at Chiredzi hospital will die in the coming year alone for lack of something as basic as incubators. So beside the obvious cost in sweat and millions of dollars in treasure for Bona,s baby the nation will also indirectly in human suffering and lost lives in lost opportunity to provide a safe health service.

The nation would also want to know why was the huge sums of money spent sending Bona and company overseas for her health needs were not used to build, equip and staff one local hospital to the same five star standards she demands. It would have been a bitter pill to swallow that the nation has a two tier health delivery system, a five star for the ruling elite and a substandard one for the masses, just as the whites had done before independence. One would hope that the latter would benefit from excess skills, plant, etc. required for the former thus ensuring standards do not fall below the star rating to outright "unsafe" for human use as has happened!

If one has to congratulate Mugabe then it must be for degrading the nation,s health delivery system to the point where even five star hospitals in 1980 like Parirenyatwa Hospital will be lucky to have one star rating now whilst sub-provincial hospitals like Chiredzi General Hospitals are now "unsafe".

It is most disquieting that, compared to other babies in Zimbabwe, Mugabe,s grandson was born with a lot more than the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth; it has costed the nation a great fortune in cash, human suffering and even human lives to fly his pregnant mother, grandmother and the rest to a hospital far, far away to be born. It is heart breaking, given this is a family that wears nothing else but designer clothing,  booties of Mugabe,s grandson alone will be valued at thousands of dollars and God knows how many other babies whose lives would have been otherwise saved if the money had been used more prudently.

Public resources must be used for the good of all and not a select few at such exorbitant cost to the masses. It does not matter how one looks at it; this morally wrong and must be condemn in no uncertain terms!