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Health is one of the most critical services provided by Governments and Zimbabwe is no exception. So when Health and Child Care Minister Dr David Parirenyatwa pleads for the lifting of a staff freeze on hiring extra doctors and nurses and urges significant extra funding for health services, we all need to listen.

Government has partly responded already. A five percent health levy has been imposed on all sales of mobile phone airtime. Treasury now just needs to ensure that this is collected promptly and is channelled towards health services as quickly as possible.

Obviously there are accounting and legal procedures to be done, but the relevant officials must move through these as fast as possible.

It needs to be noted that this new tax is open-ended. There is no minimum or maximum sum to be passed to health services. All the tax implies is that five percent of all airtime sales must be passed to health services, so the more airtime that is sold, the more money Dr Parirenyatwa’s Ministry will receive.

Staff freezes need to be applied sensibly. The number of health professionals should be a function of the population and there must be agreed best practices. It is obviously the same for teachers; we need one for each class and that depends on the number of children in the population. So again some care is needed in applying the same sort of freeze to nurses that most people would agree could easily be applied to clerical staff, for example.

But it would not take more than a little tinkering to allow the Health Ministry to use some of the health levy to fund professional staff posts. In fact, the ministry could be granted far more discretion to decide how it wants to spend its modest budget, on the basis that a group of top medical professionals probably has a greater grasp of what the top priorities are than even the most aware and intelligent financial officials.

Clearly any division of resources must be notified and approved, but the Government, after setting the global budget, should be more concerned with oversight and hard questioning rather than giving doctors orders.

So when Dr Parirenyatwa pleads for more staff and more money he is pushing against an open door. Most people would agree he should have both and the health levy is one of the more effective responses to that.

At the same time, the Ministry of Health and Child Care needs to think through some of its own policies and practices.

For example there is a policy that people over 65, regardless of income and children under five, regardless of parental income, should have free treatment.

For others there is an all or nothing policy; they either pay in full or pay nothing.

We think a bit more variation could help. Some people are so poor that they must be given free care. But others could pay something, a quarter or a half or three quarters depending on their earnings.

There are reports that hospital and clinic pharmacies are often out of stock; so patients must buy drugs from private pharmacies. Yet it should be possible to have a system where Government patients could be allowed to buy drugs at wholesale prices if necessary. This would be a lot cheaper than private pharmacies if not as good as free medication.

In other words, the ministry needs to work out ways it can serve the most people effectively, leaving no one behind, but charging its patients what they can afford. That would stretch its budget.

There is little chance that any ministry, including health, can ever get what it wants out of the budget. Tax revenues are simply not high enough. But Dr Parirenyatwa has a sympathetic audience, which is why he will be getting the only real new tax imposed during a fairly harsh time for most people.

No Government would have dared raise a new tax in such trying circumstances for anything except health. We can all imagine the protests for any other new tax, but this one has at least been acquiescenced by a vast majority of people.

But the Minister in turn needs to show that every dollar he gets is spent to maximum effect and that his ministry is doing the best to use its resources prudently and fairly.