The health of Yumbe district is bad. Its health centers have no medicine, doctors or nurses.

Yumbe has two doctors for 140,000 people, and even then, one of these two is the Director of Health Services, and the other, Yumbe Hospital Medical Superintendent, so they have very little time to deal with patients.

Yumbe's case is the story of the majority of districts in the country. Even in Kampala, at Mulago Hospital where there are many nurses and doctors, morale is very low. Health minister Brig. Jim Muhwezi acknowledged this on Thursday, and noted that the situation has got worse since the abolition of cost sharing in government-owned hospitals last year.

The proposed increase of health workers' salaries by 5 percent is a drop in the ocean. The abolition of cost sharing in hospitals was driven mainly by the 2001 elections. Because the majority of Ugandans are poor, in its extreme cost sharing punished them because they couldn't afford to pay. However, a middle course needs to be found, in which people who can afford to pay for some of the facilities at hospitals can do so.

That will ensure that hospitals have some funds to pay for basic necessities, and not go for days without essential medicines because the cheque from the central government hasn't arrived.

Up-country it's even worse, because the cheques never get there at all. And corruption in up-country health centres is not monitored, so the health centers are largely useless buildings where only the bats find use for the ceilings. This must change. A crackdown on waste and corruption in the health service, and a carefully managed cost sharing scheme, should bring nursing care and medicines to many more people than those getting it today.