Renowned African Musicians have lashed out a scathing attack on the leaders of Africa for their failure to pay reasonable attention to the health challenges that the continent faces and thus causing a lot of pain and agony to millions of women and children that are negatively affected by Africa’s crippled health state most.
This comes at a time when AU summit is taking place in Kampala under the theme related to maternal and child health.
While addressing a press briefing at Hotel Africa after a concert that was aimed at creating awareness on the Abuja declaration of African leaders on health, the South African music legend Yvonne Chaka has said that “it is disappointing that African leaders look to donors to fund our health sector when we can fund it our countries can fund the budgets of the health sector”.
Chaka Chaka says that if African leaders do not wake up and realize that we have to invest in health, our women and our children, then we are a doomed society.
The musician says we need to hold our leaders accountable for the poor health standards on the continent.
musician Maiko Zulu
On the other hand, the Zambian Singer, Maiko Zulu who is also a human rights activist has condemned the idea of African leaders prioritizing militarism at the expense of the health of the people just because of their selfish ends of keeping themselves in power.
He says t is disheartening that in countries like Zambia, a president can afford to treat a simple knee injury in hospitals abroad yet millions of people in that country lack the necessary medical treatment that they need.
African leaders committed to commit at least 15% of their budgets to the health sector by 2015 in the Abuja declaration in 2001 but since then only six countries on the continent have managed to do this so far and with most of the countries in Africa unlikely to reach that mark by 2015.
Yet out of the six countries only one of them has used its domestic resources to fund the 15% of the health budget with all the other five financing their health budgets using donor resources to go past the 15% mark.
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See other stories on maternal health issues
By Tiberindwa Zakaria
Musicians rap African leaders over failure to address health issues on the continent
Renowned African Musicians have lashed out a scathing attack on the leaders of Africa for their failure to pay reasonable attention to the health challenges that the continent faces and thus causing a lot of pain and agony to millions of women and children that are negatively affected by Africa’s crippled health state most.
This comes at a time when AU summit is taking place in Kampala under the theme related to maternal and child health.
While addressing a press briefing at Hotel Africa after a concert that was aimed at creating awareness on the Abuja declaration of African leaders on health, the South African music legend Yvonne Chaka has said that “it is disappointing that African leaders look to donors to fund our health sector when we can fund it our countries can fund the budgets of the health sector”.
Chaka Chaka says that if African leaders do not wake up and realize that we have to invest in health, our women and our children, then we are a doomed society.
The musician says we need to hold our leaders accountable for the poor health standards on the continent.
On the other hand the Zambian Singer, Maiko Zulu who is also a human rights activist has condemned the idea of African leaders prioritizing militarism at the expense of the health of the people just because of their selfish ends of keeping themselves in power.
He says t is disheartening that in countries like Zambia, a president can afford to treat a simple knee injury in hospitals abroad yet millions of people in that country lack the necessary medical treatment that they need.
African leaders committed to commit at least 15% of their budgets to the health sector by 2015 in the Abuja declaration in 2001 but since then only six countries on the continent have managed to do this so far and with most of the countries in Africa unlikely to reach that mark by 2015.
Yet out of the six countries only one of them has used its domestic resources to fund the 15% of the health budget with all the other five financing their health budgets using donor resources to go past the 15% mark.
See more stories on African Union
See other stories on maternal health issues
By Tiberindwa Zakaria