It needed a fatal road traffic accident which occurred along the Harare-Beitbridge Road on Thursday last week to reveal the dire state of the country's health situation.
Twenty-five people died on Thursday morning — 17 on the spot and eight others on admission to Beitbridge Hospital — when an Urban Connect bus was involved in an accident with a haulage truck about 25km outside Beitbridge.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared the accident a state of disaster.
That the country’s health sector is in a bad state was in the public domain. Unbeknown was the extent of the deterioration.
In one picture is an injured man lying on a bed that has gone past its sell-by date, with his dislocated leg wrapped with a cardboard box to straighten it up.
The hospital has no cast, which holds a broken bone (fracture) in place and prevents the area around it from moving as it heals.
Another shows an injured woman, her hand wrapped with cardboard paper, narrating her ordeal to government ministers Daniel Garwe (Local Government) and Felix Mhona (Transport and Infrastructural Development).
Instead of a cast, her hand was wrapped in cardboard paper by enterprising health workers who wanted the job done despite the unavailability of resources.
The two pictures illustrate the dire situation in government hospitals and clinics which have run out of sundries. Doctors are forced to dig deeper into their pockets to buy sundries that should be readily available in all public hospitals.
Beitbridge Hospital was overwhelmed and 10 seriously injured people among the 56 who were attended to at Beitbridge Hospital were transferred by road, enduring 200km and 321km to Gwanda and Bulawayo, respectively.
The much talked about air ambulances were nowhere in sight to airlift the injured to better-equipped hospitals. When the air ambulances, a donation made by Russia to Zimbabwe, were launched amid pomp and fanfare, officials said they would airlift the critically injured to better-equipped hospitals.
That the air ambulances were in no show should be a cause for worry. The health sector is crying for a revamp and not tokenism shown in national budgets.
Controversial taxes like the sugar levy and the intermediated money transfer tax must be put to good use in health. Lives are being lost due to unavailability of drugs in hospitals. Health instititions have run out of paracetamol, bandages and syringes — which flies in the face of the country's claims of seeking to attain an upper-middle-income economy by 2030.
The starting point is to ensure the health budget is in line with benchmarks such as the Abuja Declaration on Health, which mandates African governments to allocate at least 15% of the national budgets to the health sector.
