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Nurses at some government institutions have been boycotting night duties in protest over the amount they were getting as night duty and on-call allowances. Nurses claimed that they were being paid a paltry $3 a month as night duty allowance while some senior officials in the Ministry of Health and Child Care who did not undertake these duties were receiving more than $400 a month.
The government, in a bid to improve health workers’ conditions of service, disbursed $1.5 million through Treasury for the payment of the allowances to employees under the Health Services Board.
However, the intended beneficiaries appear not to have benefited as senior officials dipped their fingers into the fund. The senior officials were drawing a combined $100,000 a month from the fund.
These officials claiming large amounts of money from the fund were largely administrative personnel with 8 to 5 desk jobs.
Among those named as having benefited from the fund were permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health and Child Care Dr Gerald Gwinji and principal directors.
Health Services Board executive chairman Dr Lovemore Mbengeranwa attributed the payment of allowances to the undeserving officials to administrative lapses.
“It was an administrative oversight and remedial action has since been taken,” he told our Harare Bureau.
We would like to believe that this is more than an administrative oversight, considering that this is the second time the HSB has been caught up in a scandal over abuse of funds by senior health officials in a space of a year.
Last year, the majority of officials now accused of unfairly getting on call allowances were implicated in the abuse of the Health Transition Fund.
Senior officials in the Ministry of Health and Child Care could be abusing their posts and qualifications as doctors to unfairly benefit from schemes aimed at frontline workers.
The actions by senior officials also border on fraud if they claimed money for duties they did not do.
Dr Mbengeranwa needs to reassure the tax-paying public on measures the board is taking to ensure that this “administrative oversight” will not happen in the future should the government come up with another scheme for the health sector.
Despite the HSB’s admission that it erred, we hope a probe into the abuse of the facility ordered by Health Minister Dr David Parirenyatwa will go ahead so that it goes to the core of the problem and come up with recommendations to stop a recurrence of abuse of public funds in the ministry.
Since the money was paid in error, senior officials who unfairly benefited from the fund must also be asked to repay every cent which they were not entitled to.
Now that HSB has rectified the anomaly and increased nurses’ allowances, all health sector workers who have been withholding their services must return to work.
In future, the HSB should not wait for its workers to embark on industrial action before admitting to its mistakes and correcting them. During the time the nurses were on strike, it is the ordinary patient who was suffering because they could not access health services.
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter