Rest in Peace Zororo Makamba, January 1990 - 23 March 2020, aged 30.
The Grieving Makamba Family Reveals the Nightmare They experienced At Wilkins Hospital During Zororo's final hours. Are We Really Prepared To Deal With Coronavirus?
What about ordinary Zimbabweans who don’t have high profile people’s contact numbers to plea and beg for life saving measures.
Makamba family fumes over Zororo’s death
BELOW is a full statement made to the Daily News by the late Zororo
Makamba’s family after he became the first Zimbabwean to succumb to
coronavirus at Wilkins Hospital in Harare yesterday.
Zororo was the
son of business mogul and Zanu PF politician James Makamba. Family
spokesperson Tawanda Makamba, elder brother to Zororo, spoke to Daily
News reporter Sindiso Mhlope and below is the verbatim extract.
Zororo was in New York for 20 days and when he came back he had a slight
flue, a cold. He then went to his general practitioner and they checked
him for coronavirus symptoms and they said he didn’t have them at the
time.
He was just told that he had a cough and a flue because in
New York it’s cold and here it’s hot, so they then treated him for flue
and he came back home.
On Friday last week he started developing a
fever and his doctor recommended that he had to be admitted. This is
because Zororo had a tumour removed from just under his left lung last
year in November and he was under an 18-month recovery time-frame.
His immune system was already compromised, so the doctor was very keen
that he gets into the hospital and receives proper medication to help
him get over the flue and fever.
He was further advised to go to
Wilkins Hospital to test for the coronavirus. He arrived at Wilkins
Hospital by 10 am and samples were collected from him and we were told
that the results would be in after 6 hours.
After 6 hours there
were no results and his general practitioner called to find out why the
results had not been availed yet. The hospitals officials then told the
GPA that they had not run the tests yet they were waiting for samples
from provincial hospitals to run them all at once.
The doctor got
frustrated and started questioning why they had not run the tests given
that Zororo’s condition was deteriorating. After some time they then
decided to run the test and in the meantime we took him home and he
needed oxygen.
His GPA phoned around and an ambulance came home to
deliver the oxygen and then we got the positive results for coronavirus
at about 1:30 or 2:00am the following day.
They told us that now that they had confirmed that he had the virus he had to be taken to the Wilkins Hospital for treatment.
We then inquired if we could him bring immediately and we were told
that the hospital was not ready to receive coronavirus patients.
So
in the morning we waited and waited and they were still not ready to
admit him. He ended up being admitted around 10am and 11am.
His
doctor made it clear earlier on that he had to be on a ventilator
because he could not breathe. However, when we got at Wilkins Hospital
there was no ventilator, no medication and even the oxygen would run out
and they had to get it from the City of Harare.
After that we ran
around to find a ventilator for him and we managed to get a portable
ventilator from a family friend who had a relative who used the
ventilator before he died.
In terms of medicine you need to
breathe, they didn't have it there, we had to go and buy it in South
Africa. We ended up finding some today (yesterday)just as he was passing
away at a local pharmacy, yet the hospital was telling us it was not
locally available.
We then brought the ventilator on Sunday by 2pm
and when we got here, because the portable ventilator had an American
plug, they told us to get an adapter because they only had round sockets
at the hospital. I then rushed to buy an adapter and came back and they
never used it and when I asked why they were not using the ventilator
they said they had no sockets in his room. So they didn’t have
medication, ventilators and we brought them a ventilator and they didn’t
have sockets in his room. I told them that I had an extension cord and
pleaded with them to use the cord, but they refused.
They forced us
to come here, but failed to deliver on their promise. When Zororo had
his operation, he had it at Health Point Clinic. I contacted the people
at Health Point and asked if they were willing to take Zororo in and
they said yes and that they had already set up a facility to accommodate
him.
We then appealed to Health minister Obadiah Moyo that since
you are not prepared at Wilkins Hospital can we take him to Health Point
and he refused.
Minister Moyo said we could not take him there and
that needed to be treated at Wilkins. We were puzzled and wondered how
he could say that Zororo should be treated at Wilkins when they don’t
even have plugs in his room to connect the ventilator.
He promised
us all sorts of things that this morning (yesterday) they would
definitely be a ventilator and equipment but nothing materialised. If
you go inside there you will see that they are not prepared to handle
cases this side.
The minister at some point also suggested that we
could take him to a trauma centre in Borrowdale. When it was now time
for us to go to Borrowdale trauma they refused us to go there.
Instead they got the owner of Borrowdale Trauma Centre to call me and he
told me that he could come and set up an ICU at Wilkins for Zororo
complete with a ventilator and monitors, but he said that we had to pay
US$120 000 for the equipment.
He added that once Zororo finishes
using the equipment and recovers we had to donate the equipment to
Wilkins Hospital. So basically the hospital wanted us to buy the
equipment for them. We don’t have US$120 000 and it is not our
responsibility to buy equipment for the government.
On top of that,
remember this is a critical patient, nurses would only visit him after
two hours because they were afraid of handling his situation. We had to
phone from home, calling the nurse station to tell them that Zororo was
in distress and that his oxygen was finished because they were not going
to check on him.
It even got to a point where they were telling us that we are bothering them but Zororo was struggling in there.
My mother and his fiancé have been parked out here for the past two days and they wouldn’t allow us to come in.
The minister lied to us on many occasions. He lied to us that they were
going to bring equipment and doctors but nothing ever materialised.
We reached out to President Emmerson Mnangagwa and First Lady Auxilia
Mnangagwa who promised us that Zororo could be transferred to Beatrice
and that there was a room for him. Nothing came out of this.
We even
appealed to them saying that if they have failed then they should allow
us to take him home and treat him ourselves because really what he
needed was oxygen.
At the end before he died, he kept telling us
that he was alone and scared and the staff was refusing to help him to a
point where he got up and tried to walk out and they were trying to
restrain him.
So this is how my younger brother ended up dying. I want people to know that the government is lying.
Remember at some point I spoke to the president and he was saying that
the report he received about Wilkins from the Health minister is that
there is equipment and medicine.
However, right now they don’t even
have water at Wilkins. So if you come here to be treated for corona
there is absolutely no treatment you will get, you will die.
I am
not a healthcare giver but I have respect for nurses and doctors. The
doctor we were in contact with here at Wilkins would turn off his phone
yet he was the critical contact person, the nurses also refused to help
us.
So people need to know that the government is ill-prepared, it is not ready to deal with this virus.
Right now we have been outside since 12pm and they have not given us his body, neither have they told us the way forward.
Zororo passed away between 11am and 12pm today (yesterday) and the
hospital called us to come and look at his body. When we got there, we
were, however, told that they had already put his body in a body bag and
taken it to the mortuary.
Until now at 5pm we have been waiting for further communication and they have not even given us any of his belongings.
This is such a heart-breaking experience for us and it goes to show the
lack of seriousness our government has in dealing with the coronavirus.
Zimbabwe, Coronavirus, covid19, zororo makamba, james makamba, mnangagwa,