Poorest suffer as hospital strike enters second month

The poorest residents of the Chadian capital N’djamena are struggling to cope as a strike that has closed hospitals across the city enters a second month, and union and government leaders say they are still not ready to compromise. At 10 a.m. on Saturday morning in front of the emergency ward of the general hospital, not far from the N’djamena town hall, 50-year-old Saleh, a filthy bandage wrapped around his shoulder, stood slumped against a wall, groaning. “This is the third day I’ve come here,” he said. “They told me the people are on strike and do not work. I don’t have money to go to a clinic for treatment. So I keep coming back here every day in the hope the nurses will take pity on me and change these bandages I’ve been wearing for three weeks.” The same scene was played out in front of another hospital in the south of N’djamena, where Marianne had brought her young child, struck down with potentially deadly malaria. The doors there were locked too. “I don’t know what to do. My child has malaria, he cries all night,” she said. “His father told us not to go to the hospital near our house because he said we wouldn’t find anyone there, and here it is the same.” Chad is the fifth poorest country in the world, according to the UN’s human development index, which takes into account factors like income, access to education, and longevity. The country’s largest trade union, the UST, called a week-long stoppage on 5 June to demand a five percent wage increase it says its members, which include hospital and government workers, were promised by the government in 2005. Union leaders say they demanded a 50 percent wage increase last year. The government asked them to wait until 2007, and the union says it agreed in exchange for a five percent raise in 2006. Chadian Minister for Public Affairs Fatime Kimto last week accused the strikers of being “inhumane”. “They are not human. Why not do the strike elsewhere and leave the hospitals and health clinics functioning?” she told journalists. Kimto says the government cannot afford to raise public-sector pay while it is facing down an armed rebellion. Armed militia groups, some based in neighbouring Sudan, have launched an attack on successive Chadian towns since last year, culminating in a battle on the capital N’djamena’s outskirts last April which left over 200 dead. “The external menace is intensified in the country. We need to be sure that we have enough financial and material means,” she said, adding that the Finance minister had met with the strikers to explain this on 3 July. But the UST says it will not back down. “If they will not resolve this problem then we will have to continue like this. It is not our fault that people are dying at the hospital. There is ill will on the part of the government, that is all,” Djibrine Assali, secretary general of the UST told IRIN, adding that “the argument about security does not hold”. The only concern of N’djamena’s would-be patients is how to get treated. Those that can afford it are turning to the city’s private clinics. And pharmacy workers say many others are resorting to self-treatment, bombarding dispensaries with requests for medicines and free advice. But for the poorest, it is up to the government to get things moving again. “Can the government not just give the nurses the five percent they have asked for? It is not much money and would not cost more than making war. They don’t care about our lives,” mumbled a woman waiting at the gates of the closed hospital in the capital’s 3rd district and complaining of breathing difficulties. Looking across the street at a private clinic, ironically named Espoir (Hope), she said: “I cannot afford to go there. I cannot pay 5,000 CFA francs (US $10). because I do not have the money.” mn/nr/ccr