By Lloyd Makonese

Who needs luxury mattresses when you can have iron grids and soiled duvets? At Karoi District Hospital, patients are now offered the full experience of institutional austerity, complete with torn linen and exposed metal frames. Who knew healing could be so character-building?

Lying in agony on bare mesh, this patient joins a growing list of Zimbabweans whose recovery depends more on personal grit than on public care. The bed looks like something salvaged from a scrapyard. The mattress, stained and hollowed out, offers more bacteria than comfort. No doubt, someone, somewhere, is calling this resilience.

But where are the officials? Where is the outrage? And more importantly, where is the Ministry of Health and Child Care? These images are not from a war zone. They are from a public hospital in peacetime Zimbabwe. Yet there is more dignity in a prison cell than in these so-called wards.

Karoi Hospital has become a poster child for what happens when the government elite are consumed by the pursuit of power, wealth, fame, and personal legacy, while the basic needs of the people are treated as background noise. As patients lie on wire beds with stained blankets, social media has succeeded where reports and petitions have long failed, dragging shame into the public square. The question now is whether this public humiliation will lead to decisive action, or whether those in charge will continue basking in comfort while the sick twist in pain on cold, rusted frames.