| Crossroads:Politician: Two months crash course to make you ‘doctor’ | Send to a friend |
| Saturday, 04 February 2012 21:22 |
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Majority of our parents are small-scale farmers and have little or no hope of agriculture taking them out of poverty, they mostly want their children to go to school. It is a gateway to becoming professionals. Otherwise, unprofessional jobs, apart from trade and a few talents are a sure sentence to life in poverty in our settings as a country. No wonder if you attend any university graduation ceremony, there is a lot of joy, with family members, knowing that, now their sons or daughters can go to places with the door of being a professional wide open. After settling down in a job, many Tanzanian professionals feel that adding another tag would do no harm. Those ambitious enough, seek for political seats. That is why our Parliament is composed of men and women coming from different professions. We have medical doctors, lawyers, priests, academicians and traditional healers among so many other professions. What does this tell us? Any person can become a politician. Fortunately, for politicians, any professional can be a politician but not any politician can be a professional. There is a common joke among professionals that if you want to ditch your profession, the easiest way is to join politics. It seems when the majority of African professions join politics there is something that goes wrong somewhere. They stop seeing the common citizen’s plight, which they have been part of. It is never a surprise, to see a politician who is a medical doctor by profession, being appointed minister of agriculture. Politicians see themselves as capable of solving all communal needs with their leadership. This is fallacy. It is easy for the politician to politicize any issue, even problems that need high professionalism to solve. Trying to solve communal problems politically, that need technocrat solutions, is dalliance that just adds fuel to fire. I have in mind the doctors’ strike, which has left the common citizen who can’t afford private hospitals suffering. Medicine is a highly specialised profession and doctors are in great demand. This is because our country does not produce enough to go with the population growth. The profession faces a number of problems that amicably could have been solved. Nevertheless, because the authorities have been trying to resolve the issue politically, there has been no solution in sight. If the authorities had only given an ear to the doctors from the word go the crisis would not have escalated. It is virtually impossible to replace the striking doctors. The armed forces doctors are like adding a drop of water in the ocean, as far as the medical needs of Tanzanians are concerned, and posting them at the national referral hospital does not help much. Every single doctor counts in the country. The government should have a deliberate policy to ensure work environment for the members of this profession is feasible. Maybe some politicians are wishing medicine were like teaching. Remember when politicians at the ministry of education conceived two months crash programme to minimise problem of shortage of teachers. Mr Politician, this can’t be in medicine. The government has few alternatives with the doctors- give them an ear, improve their work environment. Otherwise, the ministry of health has failed big time… if it can’t solve problems facing doctors who embodies the health sector, what else can it do? Saumu Jumanne is an Assistant Lecturer, Dar es Salaam University College of Education (DUCE) Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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