DO WE STILL NEED FOREIGN DOCTORS?

Sir,

I am concerned about the continuous renewal of contracts of foreign doctors when dozens of emaSwati doctors are languishing at home, unemployed. I’m writing to your widely read newspaper as a concerned liSwati doctor, fully registered with the Swaziland Medical and Dental Council (SMDC), unemployed and currently sitting at home, while our government continues renewing contracts of foreign doctors with similar qualification.

Welfare

As I write, we have more than a dozen emaSwati doctors unemployed because it seems like our Ministry of Health doesn’t care about our welfare. We have noticed from other ministries, which include the Ministry of Education, that they have stopped renewing contracts for expats, including work permits due to the high number of unemployed teachers in the country. Eswatini Medical and Dental Council needs to remember to preserve and protect the health sector to continue being the preserve of emaSwati doctors and the population. We cannot allow the industry to be overrun by foreign interests at the expense of locals. We currently have emaSwati doctors languishing at home and yet, just recently foreign doctors were hired by government.Ask yourself why it is so difficult for you as a liSwati to go practice in South Africa or other countries. Our industry regulatory framework should be equally stringent to ensure that our children will find opportunities when they finish studying.

Injustice

This is our country, and we cannot tolerate this injustice for so long. Even for employed emaSwati doctors, unfair treatment still exists. You find a foreign medical doctor staying in a splash three-bedroom house, with servants quarters, while emaSwati struggle even to get a lousy accommodation, and this has become a norm. The unfortunate thing is that as emaSwati doctors, this is our country, and we have nowhere to go. Other countries prioritise their own, while we give preferential treatment to foreigners. In NGOs, you find them; in the private sector, you find them and when you come to public hospitals, solo ngibo. It’s high time we rise up and fight these injustices.

Soon we will have medical graduates…where will they work? We need to interrogate and look honestly at these agendas being pushed or else. It is not normal to have Eswatini medical officers unemployed, yet there are posts for expatriate medical officers still retained. It is high time for the council to even limit the number of expatriate medical officers who are sitting for the PRES exam. This is, because, apart from us who are sitting, unemployed at home, we have so many medical interns who will soon graduate to be medical officers, and they too need those positions both in public and private practice. I have also heard that we will soon have Eswatini Christian University opening their Medical School, those medical students enrolling at that Medical School need spaces.

This situation is a ticking time bomb, and it’s gonna explode. The practicing space hasn’t changed much but the number of doctors being trained especially emaSwati have been increasing in recent years. So, accommodating everyone is going to be a problem now. We can’t, however, ignore that every country works towards empowering its own people while also using skills from expatriates in areas where locals are not yet trained on. The tricky part is when the country has trained its own people to provide those services which have been provided by expatriates: It becomes difficult to get the balance. It only makes sense for the government to source skills, which locals can not provide. The consistent message is this, let’s saturate spaces where emaSwati qualify with locals.

Post your comment

Your name:

Your e-mail address:

Add your comments:

Please enter the code you see in the image:

Image:

Code: