Part 2: The Strike

Nurses were the first to participate in the “go-slow” in late May. Press coverage was minimal at the beginning, but by June 3, a newspaper report stated that the strike was nationwide. Within days, the strike was front-page news, and it extended beyond nurses to doctors, education workers, and other government workers.

Things came to a head during the second week of June. Clinics throughout Zambia were shuttered. So were schools due to a teachers’ strike; there were reports of students rioting in several cities.

The stories began to pour in. As people died in hospitals, no staff was available to move them to the morgue, so corpses languished for hours or days alongside the living. Sick patients, including mothers with newborn children, were released from clinics prematurely because no one could attend to them. Zambians with HIV and AIDS in need of treatment were turned away.

The number of “Brought In Dead” cases skyrocketed at some hospitals as people denied care at smaller clinics died before arriving at bigger ones. Some people were instructed not to bother bringing the dead to mortuaries; they were to be taken directly to burial grounds.

The most infamous story of all: A woman in Lusaka went into labor during the second week of June. Accompanied by her husband, she went to three medical clinics; each could not help her due to the strike. Next, she rushed to an off-duty midwife, but the midwife could not help her because the child was coming feet first -- a “breech birth.” As a last resort, the woman went to University Teaching Hospital, the best (and possibly the most expensive) public hospital in Zambia. Arriving near midnight, the woman exited the car with the baby already “dangling,” as one newspaper reported. She “only managed to move up to the pavement where she delivered.” Other sources stated that she delivered into a wheelbarrow. The baby died.

During the same week, Zambian President Rupiah Banda had a knee operation in South Africa. A government spokesperson explained that the president was in serious pain and that his knee required “urgent medical attention” while he was abroad.