guest column You may have heard about the seven babies stillborn at Harare Hospital in one day at the end of July. From the maternity register that night, you can see that the infants were on average a healthy weight. They should have survived. The reason they died is because Zimbabwe’s health system is simply not functioning as we speak. Many doctors, like me, are afraid to say this because our government only knows how to use force. That’s why I am writing this anonymously. But the reality here is that the tragic case of those stillborn babies is just one of many. There are many more people dying. This situation was already desperate last year. Medics in Zimbabwe were struggling to get by on such low wages and to work in such poor conditions. This led us to go on strike in September 2019. We only returned to work in January 2020 when telecoms tycoon Strive Masiyiwa offered to supplement our government wages with a monthly subsistence allowance through his charitable foundation. But then, in March, COVID-19 reached Zimbabwe. At a time when the dilapidated healthcare sector urgently needed support and attention, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s administration did nothing. In April, the High Court ordered the government to ensure all healthcare workers were supplied with personal protective equipment (PPE). But now in August, there is still hardly any PPE. If you are lucky, you’ll get an N-95 mask (one with an air filter), but we’re mostly working with one surgical mask that has to last the entire day and plastic aprons. We hear more and more of nurses being infected and, when they do, there is no insurance for them, no support, and no one to look after them. This, in the middle of a pandemic. Pay has also remained desperately inadequate. Health workers are not asking for money to buy expensive houses and go on holiday, but just enough to survive. As a doctor, for instance, I receive about $175/month. That’s a little less than $6 a day. Both my wife and I are frontline workers, and we struggle to pay rent and bills with this pay. The situation is even more dire for nurses. Many of these essential workers receive just $30/month and go hungry because they can’t afford to spend money on food. It’s for these reasons that nurses in Zimbabwe went on strike two months ago. Instead of improving pay, PPE and working conditions, however, the government brought in student nurses and those who had been out of work for a long time. This meant that many wards were overwhelmed or staffed with nurses who were either inexperienced or who hadn’t received recent training. Shortly after, doctors downed tools too. We are demanding the same things as our colleagues: PPE; better conditions and equipment in hospitals; decent pay; and for our salaries to be paid in US dollars rather than the RTGS dollar (or “Zimdollar”) which is subject to hyperinflation. Throughout the pandemic and following the story about the death of the babies, some of us have been criticised for going on strike. I understand, but we are not striking because we don’t want