Maybe, our government doesn’t care about us?

Awoman died a few days ago on a surgeon’s operating table—while her guts were open to the elements. I did not know her name. But before she breathed her last, she let out a lingering scream that resounded through the corridors and waiting area of the public hospital—drowning out all conversation to utter silence. Like many who die in our public hospitals, places of healing so they say, I suppose she was wheeled away to join the community of the silent dead. Like many who die, she probably found eternal relief from the false hopes that life promises all of us, but seldom fulfils. But there is where the comparison ends, because her death was different.

Her death was the kind no one should have to experience.

For, as she lay on the table, with doctors and nurses hovering over her body, cutting into her to save her life, she could feel every inch of every cut—metal slicing against the rawness of living flesh. Why? The hospital had no anesthesia to numb the pain!

But, why is this important? Why should any of us care for such a nameless woman in a country where many women die for no good reason in a place of supposed healing?

We should care because right now, as you read this in the safety and comfort of a painless existence, there is probably another nameless woman screaming, surrounded by helpless doctors and nurses who cannot even give her a painkiller to ease her discomfort. We should care because, as someone once said, one can judge how much a government cares for its people by looking at its healthcare system.

If that is true, I wonder how the nameless woman felt about our government before her life fainted to black? What does her experience say about our own government?

I would really love if our Cabinet ministers spent a day—just one day—in one of our public hospitals, without protocol or media fanfare, and see the “works of their hands”. I would really wish, though wishing is pointless, our honourable ones stood in those corridors that tremored with that nameless woman’s scream and dare say “we are delivering on our promises!” I wish that nameless woman’s scream could haunt our leaders and keep them up at night, like the many guardians who do not sleep at all because they are looking after many nameless women.

That nameless woman probably voted for you, dear leader. That nameless woman probably attended your rallies and heard you speak highly of the future—a future she hoped to see in her lifetime. She probably pinned her hopes on you, believing that you had her back and would save her as people like her expect you to. That nameless woman probably even prayed for you, channeling wisdom from the Most High to your doorstep.

But now she is dead. Her hopes, smothered. Her expectations, silenced. Her story is done—painful as it may have been. But sadly, her story is all too familiar and far too commonplace.

That is why I expect more humility from our leaders, rather than self-praise, when even ONE of us dies in such a manner under their watch. That is why I expect the well-groomed heads of our leaders to be lowered in shame when ANYONE experiences a pointless, avoidable and excruciating end such as this; an end which seems to echo from an era when people believed the earth was flat.

This is just not right!

I challenge you, our leaders, to go and see your fulfilled promises in the flesh and dare have the audacity or the gall to self-congratulate. If standing in that corridor, and hearing that nameless woman’s scream, does not shake you to the core and, in the very least, humble you, dear sirs and madams, then I fervently pray, as that nameless woman did for you times without measure, that one day it is you on that operating table with your guts to wind, feeling the blade slice through your naked flesh before you meet your Maker to offer an account of your time and life on Earth.

And may God, being a God of Justice, multiply that nameless woman’s pain in your afterlife and may no-one hear you scream.

The writer is a social commentator