Prime
Samuel Leeds hospital ward put greedy health officials to shame
Musaazi Namiti
What you need to know:
- Health officials need to use this experience to tackle corruption
You have probably seen photos of the Samuel Leeds Ward at Jinja Regional Referral Hospital all over social media. They are doing the rounds on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook and on his website, samuelleeds.com.
Samuel Leeds is a British entrepreneur who financed the construction of the new ward using his own money. In a video about the ward, he says he had visited Uganda in 2018 to run a business workshop, and in a tragic twist of fate, he had a serious accident a day after his arrival.He broke his leg while rafting on the Nile and was rushed to Jinja Regional Referral Hospital. “When I was in hospital, it was terribly small," Mr Leeds says.
“There were people coming in, in a worse state than I was, [and they] were being sent away because there was no space for them in the hospital.”He decided to construct an orthopaedic ward with 62 beds, which he unveiled a couple of weeks ago. In all, he spent Shs1b on the project.But there is something about the project that surprised Ugandans and has been the subject of animated debate on social media: Health officials Mr Leeds consulted had told him the ward would cost Shs6b and take three years to complete.
Ugandans have had to hark back to the International Specialised Hospital of Uganda in Lubowa on the outskirts of Kampala. The government has spent more than Shs600b on the hospital construction, according to the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, Joel Ssenyonyi, but there is no proper accountability on expenditure.
Mr Leeds’s revelation provides two key lessons for us. The first is that the cost of our health projects is artificially inflated by health officials who want to get rich at the expense of the intended beneficiaries. It should be recalled that corruption and incompetence in the Ministry of Health are serious problems, as the late Prof Anthony K. Mbonye’s book, Uganda's health sector through turbulent politics, attests.The second lesson is that even though Uganda is a poor country and cannot have modern health facilities like rich countries, it can still do a lot with the little it has.
In other words, if the money is not stolen and is put to good use, it can fix many health problems we are facing.Mr Leeds did not let anyone touch his money. He provided money for whatever had to be bought, and the ward was completed in seven months.
Had he made a cash donation for construction, many health officials working on the project would have schemed to grab a cut of the money.Ugandans are grateful to Mr Leeds, but he is now doing something typical of many Europeans and North Americans. When they are running a project in South Sudan, for example, they call it an Africa project, not a South Sudan project.On his website, Mr Leeds published an article with the following headline ‘I just built a brilliant new 62 bed hospital ward in Africa’.
He did not use “Uganda” in the headline, yet if he had built the ward in Montenegro or Moldova, he would have used these countries’ names.
While Mr Leeds's initiative is commendable, his use of "Africa" rather than "Uganda" reinforces the narrative of a homogenous, dependent continent always banking on foreigners for charity.
Having said that, health officials need to use this experience to tackle corruption, which inflates healthcare costs, delaying progress. The country's resources could go further with proper management. Will we see change for the better? Only time will tell.
Mr Namiti is a journalist and former Al Jazeera digital editor in charge of the Africa desk
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