Paidamoyo Chipunza recently in Bulawayo
The National Social Security Authority (NSSA) has challenged local specialist doctors to group up and operationalise Ekusileni Medical Centre in Bulawayo, which has been lying idle for the past 13 years.

The 200-bed hospital was built in 2000 in honour of the late Vice President Dr Joshua Nkomo, as a specialist hospital wholly funded by NSSA.

NSSA solely funded the project after two other investors, the Zimbabwe Health Care Trust and the Mining Industry Pension Fund, pulled out. The hospital has failed to open since its completion owing to boardroom squabbles, forcing Government to announce at some point that it was taking over its management.

Speaking at NSSA’s rehabilitation centre’s open day in Bulawayo recently, the authority’s board chairperson Mr Robin Vela said his organisation was keen to see the institution working.

“As NSSA, we want the facility to work,” he said. “It is not working. We cannot continue to play the blame game. I think we now need to say, let us come together as Zimbabweans and find a way to make it work for us all.”

Mr Vela said if put to good use, Ekusileni could actually reduce the number of Zimbabwean patients seeking specialist services outside the country and associated costs.

“The narrative that we hear all the time is the narrative of people looking for specialists treatment in India, looking for specialist services from anywhere in the world, but the reality when you look at those places, India, Russia, South Africa — in most of the places, the people behind the duty of operations are Zimbabweans,” said Mr Vela.

He said since Zimbabweans had the required expertise to conduct the specialist services, NSSA had the needed infrastructure through Ekusileni, which local specialists could ride on.

“It is a facility which I believe at the time was world class,” he said. “It is a facility that I believe with a forward looking minister like the one we have, can be made available to a grouping of you (specialist doctors) under some sort of indigenisation concept and come to us for a partnership.

“As NSSA, we want the facility, yes, to deliver a return to the patient, but ultimately we also got a social responsibility to look at and that social return means getting it to work and getting it to work for the wider Zimbabwe.”

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