EDITORIAL: Government must win the medicine war

Reports of shortages of essential chronic medication at public health facilities are deeply worrying. Access to medicine is not a luxury – it is the thin line between life and death.

From the onset, the new administration moved aggressively to dismantle the corrupt middleman culture that had infected the procurement of medical supplies.

That decision – to cut out unnecessary intermediaries and procure directly from manufacturers – remains, in principle, one of the boldest and most commendable reforms this administration has undertaken.

 For years, Namibia’s medical procurement system became a feeding trough for opportunists. Corruption was so entrenched that almost every ambitious hustler with a close corporation saw medicine tenders as a shortcut to instant wealth.

While ordinary citizens stood in queues only to be told that hospitals had no stock, tenderpreneurs were erecting mansions from public money meant to heal the sick. Even worse, there were persistent allegations that artificial medicine shortages were deliberately engineered in collaboration with corrupt officials so that emergency procurement could be triggered – opening the floodgates for inflated contracts and kickbacks.

Unfortunately, a reformed system that fails to deliver medicine is still a failing system. The new direct procurement model has encountered operational challenges, and those problems must be resolved urgently. The stakes are too high for trial-and-error governance.

Chronic patients cannot survive on promises and transitional difficulties. They need medicine – consistently and reliably.

Those who profited from the old corrupt order are watching closely. They are praying for this new system to collapse so they can return, masquerading as ‘solutions’ to a crisis they themselves helped create.

They would like nothing more than for government to panic and hand procurement processes back to the same networks that looted the healthcare system for years. That cannot be allowed to happen.