By Mbongeni Mbingo [Managing Editor] | 2025-03-14

Some of the continent’s top media personnel and healthcare professionals recently convened at Cape Town’s Century City Convention Centre for a meaningful dialogue on setting the tone for reporting Africa’s challenges on healthcare – especially for women.

The conference, organised by Roche Africa, was on why women should be at the centre of the healthcare agenda, with a particular sharp focus on hightlighting the barriers women face in accessing quality healthcare and the role of the media in educating and creating awareness.
Put differently, the media was being challenged to rewrite the story of women’s healthcare in Africa in helping to promote health equity.

This sobering discussion hit home immediately, given our challenges with shortage of drugs and medicines in hospitals and the long distances that women have to travel to access health – and be turned back, for that matter.
Apart from my excitement of seeing Sophie Ndaba host the conference (because I admire her resilience and staying power, although this is a story for another day of course), I found the discussions very impactful and relevant for Eswatini because we are grappling with so much corruption within the health sector so much that all the efforts to ensure healthcare access for all are now being watered down by rampant corruption and – where Roche Africa comes in – excluding women in the conversation.

To provide a broader context on this issue, the drugs shortage crisis in this country exposes the kind of challenges women in this country are experiencing while those who are entrusted with the responsibility to provide health equity are dillydallying and being complicit to the corruption that is obtaining currently.

To use an example, the fact that parliament has not had the appetite – if not the lotion to rub their hands – to debate that sorry excuse of a forensic audit to help us come to grips with the challenges we are all faced with, is a nice and proper scandal.
Therefore, this discussion on placing women at the centre of the healthcare conversation is very timely for Eswatini, which has been grappling with the near-collapse of the healthcare system exacerbated by a lack of political will in solving the healthcare crisis.

For almost three years, we have reported – consistently – about what is clearly a heist being pulled off in broad daylight and right in front of all of our eyes. To say this has fallen on deaf ears would be understating the scandal. This is why nothing tangible is happening, and not even the report submitted by those who have been telling all who care to listen about what a wonderful job they have done putting together this report, despite inexplicably failing to demonstrate how they have done so without the key personnel providing the answers to their questions, not least of all that whatever they have put in there has already been proven to be factually incorrect.

But, we go on as though all is well, and for purposes of the discussions in Cape Town, while women are struggling to access healthcare services in this country. Just last month, the ministry of health announced it was running short of dialysis treatment supply due to issues with their supplier.
This therefore reinforces the claims that there are some people who are intent on collapsing the healthcare system for their own benefit, because what else should be left to conclude given the way things are happening in this country!
Come to think of it, professionals in the health sector’s procurement and pharmaceutical sections were suspended, thrown out in the dungeons for the world to spit on them; the Central Medical Stories was castrated; and critically, there are conversations about government going directly to suppliers to cut out the supply chain, and so much character assassination of those who seem to see this for what it is!
Kuningi bekunene, kuningi mani!

But, we shall not be deterred or discouraged and the recent conference has energised those of us in the media who believe in standing up for the truth and what is right.
In Cape Town, the media gathered to be reminded of its role in helping our respective countries prioritise healthcare provision, and changing the narrative on health equity.
This for me is what we have missed in telling the story of the health crisis in this country; that the scandal of this drugs shortage has a devastating impact on the poor – and women and children who are denied of the services they desperately need. Roche, a leading provider of cancer treatments, have challenged us to work more to expose the impact of the lack of healthcare services in public hospitals and clinics.

That the women who get turned back at hospitals are the same women who worked hard to raise children and society feels the burden of the lack of services more than anyone else.
The media therefore has been encouraged to use the power of storytelling to change the narrative in access to healthcare – and where the governments fail, we expose it to ensure these are addressed.

I suppose it makes sense to remind those in parliament who are rolling the dice on that audit report I shall not bother to name, that hundreds of thousands of women are paying the price for their ineptitude – if not negligible participation in the whole drugs shortage debacle.

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