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Harare Bureau
Health and Child Care permanent secretary, Dr Gerald Gwinji and 493 other high ranking officials in the Ministry and related administrative institutions countrywide, allegedly looted a huge chunk of the $1,5 million released by Treasury for health workers’ allowances.
It could not be immediately established how much Dr Gwinji was receiving for on-call allowances, but other senior officials were milking up to $403 per month as on call allowances.
However, all these 494 people do not work at night and are not entitled to the money.
This did not go down well with the nurses who felt hard done by the move as their night duty allowance remained a paltry $3 per month, yet they are the ones who do the work at night resulting in them boycotting the night duty from Monday last week.
Although Dr Gwinji could not be reached for a comment yesterday, Health Services Board (HSB) chairman Dr Lovemore Mbengeranwa, acknowledged that there were undeserving individuals who were not supposed to benefit from the on call allowances and the issue had since been rectified.
“It was an administrative oversight and remedial action has since been taken,” Dr Mbengeranwa said.
He said this remedial action involved re-allocation of the funds to the nurses as top up to their night duty allowances.
HSB is the employer of all health workers in the country.
The revelations of these anomalies in funds allocations were made when officials from the Zimbabwe Nurses Association (Zina) approached the Chiefs Council led by Chief Fortune Charumbira on Tuesday to air their grievances.
Zina Harare provincial chairperson, Enock Dongo, led the team that met Chief Charumbira and other chiefs where they raised a number of malpractices bedevilling management.
“The officials told us that the money was supposed to go towards night allowances, health risk allowance and on-call allowances,” said Chief Charumbira.
“But the contention now is about distribution of the money. Zina allege that the greatest proportion of the $1, 5 million that came from Treasury was going to on-call allowance which is exclusively meant for senior management with each of them getting at least $400 a month while nurses get $3.
“They alleged that the permanent secretary and senior management in the ministry were getting the lion’s share of the allowances yet they are never on on-call duty,” said Chief Charumbira.
On-call duty is when health personnel report for duty when there is an emergency at night.
Documents seen by our Harare Bureau indicate that three principal directors and directors of Epidemiology and Disease Control, Government Analyst Laboratory, Laboratory Services, National Institute of Health Research and Oral Health pocketed at least $403 every month.
It could not be established if those who benefited were substantive principal directors or those who were acting.
“As Chiefs, we told the nurses that the plight of patients should come first because they’re not the reason those senior officials are getting all that money, so why punish the innocent?
“So we said they should call off the strike and engage more with players who can help break the impasse. We’ll be engaging the Minister of Health and Child Care (Dr David Parirenyatwa) to rectify the obvious anomalies because this is purely a management issue at the ministry and not fiscal.
“Everything that Dongo said was confirmed by Zimbabwe Nurses Association president Regina Smith when we contacted her. This shows that there is a serious problem,” said Chief Charumbira.
Some of the officials who dubiously earned on-call allowances were computer technicians, nurse tutors, pharmacy technicians, system administrators and hospital equipment technicians.
Ironically, the majority of the officials were also implicated in the scandal that rocked the Health Transition Fund sometime last year.
According to Zina, sometime last month, a taskforce comprising the Zina executive, Health Services Board officials and the Ministry of Health officials recommended how the money was supposed to be distributed among all health cadres.
If HSB had implemented the recommendations seen by our Harare Bureau, about $43,729 per month was going to be saved from the $1,5 million allocated.
“The saving was proposed by the team to pay night duty allowance, which should be increased to a maximum of $70 for the 2,500 members deserving the allowance,” reads part of the taskforce report.
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