BY WINSTONE ANTONIO Health workers in Zimbabwe bear the brunt of savage politics and are victimised for providing professional services to victims of political violence and demanding better working conditions, United Kingdom-based health practitioner and MDC Alliance member Sandra Kudenga has said. K Kudenga, who left Zimbabwe in 2002 after alleged victimisation by the late former President Robert Mugabe’s regime, told NewsDay that many health professionals, among them doctors, nurses and psychotherapists, had remained silent victims of polarised politics, whose needs were neglected. Health workers are currently on strike demanding salaries in the United States dollar, better working conditions and personal protective wear. “The many ‘crimes’ that lead to the victimisation of health workers include demanding that enough resources be availed to effectively discharge their duties or for protesting the obscene disparity between a peace time Defence ministry budget and a Health ministry grappling with an HIV and Aids epidemic and a plethora of other neglected tropical diseases,” she said. “Zimbabwe’s institutionalised violence has spared no one. Health professionals have been managing the trauma and are being victimised for some of their efforts to ensure that everyone enjoys better health in the process.” Added Kudenga: “It is sad how the healthcare workers who have cared for the victims of the protracted war of liberation, the Gukurahundi massacres, the abductions and tortures that accompanied every opinion that was deemed divergent, the violence that was attendant to the land seizures, and the brutal suppression of opposition voices over the past decades have been victimised.” Last year, President Emmerson Mnangagwa threatened to track human rights doctors and lawyers who attended to and assisted the #ShutDownZimbabwe protests victims. “If you look at 2008, nurses across the country, particularly in Zanu PF strongholds including Mashonaland Central and Mashonaland East, were targeted for attending to ‘wrong’ victims of political abuse,” Kudenga said. “If such a celebrated paediatric surgeon like Dr Bothwell Mbuwayesango, one of the only three in the country and one who led the all-Zimbabwean team of doctors that separated co-joined twins in 2014 in an eight-hour operation, could be victimised in October last year through suspension without pay on allegations of inciting a job action by junior hospital doctors on the pretext of incapacitation supposedly under the second republic, then no one is safe.” Kudenga said health practitioners should be allowed to air their grievances without fear of abduction, arrest or victimisation, and cited former Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association leader Peter Magombeyi’s abduction and torture. “The bravery health professionals are beginning to show in telling the truth should never be allowed to die, but needs nurturing to ensure that the truth of Zimbabwe’s troubled past is healed through a multi-sectoral approach in which health is a major factor,” she said. Thirteen nurses at Sally