The Communist Party of Swaziland (CPS) in celebration of International Nurses’ Day, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale, pays tribute to all the nurses in recognition of their role in preserving human life. Nurses are the most vulnerable in the time of the Covid-19 as they are the ones who have to directly face with patients, often without adequate personal protective equipment in the case of Swaziland.

In Swaziland, nurses have dedicated themselves to serving the people notwithstanding the deplorable state of public clinics and hospitals overflowing with patients, who are also victims of the collapsed healthcare system. The Mswati regime manipulates the nurses’ solemn pledge to serve humanity by overworking them as well as deliberately exposing them to diseases. The regime has failed to provide the nursing community with proper medical equipment over the decades. Nurses continue to be heavily exploited by the regime and also face intolerable working conditions. These are the signs of an uncaring and inhumane system.

While the people of Swaziland desperately need the improvement of the healthcare system, the regime continues to spend on the lavish lifestyle of Mswati and his family. The regime’s hiring-freeze policy is one of the direct causes of the country’s failure to deal with the Covid-19. As a result, Swaziland’s 1.69 medical staff per 1000 patients falls far below the minimum recommended by the World Health Organisation. This makes the overworking of nurses an inevitable reality.

The fight for free quality healthcare for all must be bound up with the fight for a democratic Swaziland, for the tinkhundla regime is incapable of delivering on the healthcare needs of the people. Only a democratic government can ever be capable of placing the healthcare needs of the people at the centre of its agenda, and not a select royal clique as it happens today. Thus, the fight against the tinkhundla regime cannot be suspended merely because of the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The CPS calls for the more democratic voices in defence of the rights of nurses and all healthcare workers. The people have made a clear call for the fall of the dictator, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, thus revolutionary forces must bend together in a united decisive battle for the dismantling of the entire tinkhundla system and creation of a people’s democracy.

Issued by the Communist Party of Swaziland