There should be no repeat of chaos

IN our lead story this week, we capture how a strike by nurses and doctors has paralysed Lesotho’s health delivery system.

At the centre of the chaos were grievances by health workers about delays by the government to pay their salaries.

Some claimed they had not been paid since March.

The government has responded by acknowledging the challenges, blaming it on what it says were “technical challenges” with its payment system.

That explanation has been deemed not good enough to placate an already disgruntled and angry workforce that has complained about poor working conditions and other hardships in the past.

At the time of writing last night, the national nurses association said the strike action is now over after the government began processing their salaries.

They are likely to be back at work starting today.

While disaster has been largely averted, we still think the government needs to carry out an honest post-mortem of the crisis in order to improve its systems.

One of the key lessons we hope the government has learnt is an urgent need to shake-up its communication style.

Two weeks after the strike began, Basotho were no wiser as to why the nurses were on strike.

The only explanation they got was that the nurses were on strike because they had not been paid. As to why this only affected nurses, out of the over 45 000 civil servants in Lesotho, no one seemed to know.

What the government failed to do was to offer a clear and concise explanation why its system was not processing the payments on time as it always did.

We know that systems are manned by people and the very same people had been operating the system for years.

Why was the system now in shambles?

What happened over the last two weeks is a vivid illustration of how a government or any institution for that matter ought not to communicate.

If the government led by Prime Minister Sam Matekane is to remain in touch with the people, it must sort out its communication systems. That will be key to restoring the people’s trust in its own government.

The second lesson is that government officials must be proactive in dealing with future crises of this nature.

We are pretty certain that this is not the last time that civil servants have run into problems of this nature.

We can guarantee that it will happen again.

When all is said and done, it is clear that this strike might have inflicted immense reputational damage on Matekane’s government which was swept into power on the back of grandiose promises to improve systems of governance.

Basotho voted the government on the back of promises that it will improve the lives of Basotho. And better healthcare was among some of these issues.

Now, nurses simply abandoned their workstations leaving pregnant women at the mercy of fate. We are hearing stories of horror in the villages of how some women were forced to give birth on their own.

The nurses claimed they had been incapacitated after the government failed to pay their salaries. We understand their anger and desperation.

It is our hope that the “technical challenges” – often a euphemism for incompetence – have now been resolved for good. That is critical if the government is to ensure that no Mosotho, no matter how poor, goes through the kind of hardships they had to go through in the last two weeks.