This is one of the most painful articles I have ever had to write, but it is one that could not be avoided.
I felt a deep, uncontrollable anger as I listened to the National Pharmaceutical Company (NatPharm) on this evening’s main ZBC news bulletin confidently claiming that in 2025 the supply and availability of essential medicines had “improved significantly throughout the country.”
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I could not believe what I was hearing.
I kept asking myself: improved from what, and for whom?
Because the Zimbabwe that NatPharm was describing bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Zimbabwe that millions of us are living in and enduring every single day.
It is one thing—though still unacceptable—for politicians to peddle propaganda for political expediency.
Zimbabweans have, regrettably, grown accustomed to exaggerated claims, selective statistics, and outright falsehoods meant to sanitise failure.
But it is an entirely different matter when such propaganda is pushed by a government agency responsible for medicines, when human lives are directly at stake.
This is not about politics.
This is about life and death.
People are dying in Zimbabwe every day, not because their conditions are untreatable, but because our public health institutions lack even the most basic essentials.
There are crippling shortages of drugs, cancer treatment machines, diagnostic equipment, and trained medical personnel.
Hospitals routinely send patients away with nothing more than a prescription and a shrug, forcing families—many of them already impoverished—to scramble for money to buy medicines privately or pay for tests at private laboratories.
Against this grim reality, NatPharm’s claims are not just false; they are cruel.
What makes these statements particularly enraging is that this issue is deeply personal to me.
That is why I could not wait until tomorrow to write this piece.
I had to do it this evening, while the anger and pain were still raw.
Many of my followers know that I lost my dear mother nearly three months ago, on October 4.
Her death was not just a personal tragedy; it was a damning indictment of the state of Zimbabwe’s public health system.
In the final three weeks of her life, my mother fought bravely against overwhelming odds.
She was first admitted with a pleural effusion, and after what initially appeared to be a successful chest drainage, she began suffering from excruciating abdominal pain just a week later.
This was later diagnosed as a partial abdominal obstruction, most likely caused by the resurgence and metastasising of colon cancer she had battled back in 2015.
A few days later, she lost the fight.
During those final weeks, she was admitted at Kwekwe General Hospital.
When her condition worsened, I took her to Kwekwe’s Topomasi Clinic, from where she was referred to Gweru Provincial Hospital for what was supposed to be an operation to remove the obstruction.
Tragically, only a few hours after she was transferred to the provincial hospital, she passed away the following morning.
What is crucial—and devastating—to note is that at no point did my mother receive medication from any of the government hospitals where she was admitted.
Not once.
Every tablet, every injection, every IV drip, the chest drainage equipment, the syringes, needles, catheters—everything—had to be bought privately.
Every test and scan had to be paid for at private laboratories because these services were simply unavailable at public hospitals.
This was not an exception.
It was the norm.
Every other patient I encountered was in the same predicament.
What continues to haunt me is what happened on my mother’s final night.
After she was admitted at Gweru Provincial Hospital, I was given a prescription for IV paracetamol and told to bring it during the next day’s visiting hour.
I went out and bought a whole bag of these painkillers, believing—hoping—that at least her pain would be managed.
That night, relatives who had travelled overnight from Harare managed to see her early the next morning, outside official visiting hours.
They later told me that she had spent the entire night screaming and crying in agony.
She was never given pain relief because the hospital had none.
As I was driving to Gweru the following day, carrying the medication and clinging to hope, I received the phone call that shattered my world.
My mother had passed away.
The doctor later explained to me, with commendable honesty, that the immediate cause of her death was not necessarily the cancer itself, but multiple organ failure due to respiratory complications.
In simple terms, as she cried out in pain and likely struggled to breathe—having already suffered from pleural effusion two weeks earlier—her organs were starved of oxygen and began to fail one by one.
That is what killed my mother.
So I ask the government of Zimbabwe, and NatPharm in particular: where were these essential medicines you claim were available “across the country”?
Where was this so-called “improved availability”?
My mother received nothing.
Other patients received nothing.
Not even basic pain medication.
When someone spends the final night of their life screaming in agony because a public hospital has no analgesics, what exactly has improved?
Zero is not an improvement of anything.
Please stop lying to the nation.
Thousands of Zimbabweans are losing their lives not because death was inevitable, but because the state failed to provide what was needed to keep them alive.
This is why such statements are so infuriating.
They are not just misleading; they are an insult to the suffering of ordinary people.
I personally witnessed an elderly woman who had to travel all the way from Silobela—71 kilometres—to seek treatment at Kwekwe General Hospital.
Her daughter-in-law had to hire a car every single time because the woman was too old and sick to use public transport.
Why should this be happening in 2025?
Why did my own mother have to be referred to Gweru for abdominal surgery?
The answer is painfully clear: our hospitals are hollowed out.
There is a dire shortage of specialists, many of whom have fled the country due to poor remuneration and unbearable working conditions.
This is the real crisis facing Zimbabwe.
Yet instead of confronting it honestly and transparently, the government chooses deception.
Propaganda will never save lives.
Lies will never ease pain.
Zimbabweans know the truth because we live it every day.
We see it in overcrowded wards, empty pharmacies, broken machines, and grieving families.
The government must stop the looting of national resources and adequately fund and stock public health institutions.
We deserve a country where our parents, our children, and ourselves can receive proper treatment at local clinics and hospitals without being condemned to suffering simply because we are poor.
Until that happens, claims of “improved medicine supply” are not just false—they are an affront to our humanity.
TENDAI RUBEN MBOFANA - THE UN-OPPRESSED MIND! 