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By The Citizen Reporters
Dar es Salaam. Striking doctors yesterday turned away two officials sent by Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda to arrange a meeting with them.Their action is seen as dashing hopes of seeing medical services, which were paralysed by a countrywide doctors’ strike, back to normal. The doctors said they were planning to hold a peaceful demonstration and public rallies to communicate their long standing plight to the public.
Further, they said they could not meet the PM as they had resolved to have a rest yesterday and resume with their meetings tomorrow. The new development comes a day after the doctors refused to attend a meeting last weekend. Instead they turned away three cabinet ministers and two top officials of the ministry of Health and Social Welfare who were in desperate attempts to bring the situation back to normal.
Yesterday the doctors sent back the two PMO officials, telling them instead to come with an official communication from the leader of government business explaining his intention to meet them.
The chairman of the Medical Association of Tanzania (Mat), Dr Stephen Ulimboka, told reporters yesterday: “We have directed them to go and come back with their message in writing and after reading it we shall also respond to it in writing.” He hinted that they were preparing peaceful demonstrations and public rallies to communicate with the public the truth about the strike and the distortion from the government. “We think it is the right time to hold demonstrations and public rallies to tell wananchi about problems facing the health sector.
The system is rotten and the ministry (of Health and Social Welfare) is facing a lot of problems while people at the top of it are destructive,” he said.
At the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC), doctors were only attending emergency cases. One doctor cautioned that the situation would further deteriorate from tomorrow.
“Starting tomorrow we expect to close all clinics because there is no doctor here,” said one of the doctors at the emergency section. Clinics likely to be closed normally attend diabetics, Aids patients, post-natal clinics.
He said there were also all signs that nurses would join the strike anytime tomorrow to press for doctors’ claims of decent pay and better working conditions.
Further reports said doctors at Mt Meru Hospital in Arusha, who had been on a go-slow, are expected to join the strike tomorrow. In Dodoma, patients at the regional hospital pleaded with the government to stop playing around with their lives. They urged it to immediately sit with the doctors and come up with an amicable solution to their problems.
The number of patients who died at the hospital is said to have been rising each passing day, a situation which forced some people take their relatives out of the hospital.
(Reported by Geofrey Nyangoro, Dar; Daniel Mjema, Moshi; Daniel Mwingira, Masoud Masasi and Hamisi Mwesi, Dodoma).
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