Zakayo the Chimp receives better healthcare than most Ugandans

This being Uganda where the healthcare system is so sick that poor citizens had better not get sick, the picture of Zakayo getting first class healthcare intrigued me!

The Sunday Monitor of January 27, carried a front page photo which to me is the photo of the year so far. It was of ‘one’ Mzee Zakayo, who was undergoing a ‘routine’ medical checkup. There is nothing wrong with this, except that Mzee Zakayo is not a human being. He is a 49-year-old chimp!

This being Uganda where the healthcare system is so sick that poor citizens had better not get sick, the picture of Zakayo getting first class healthcare intrigued me!

Looking at the picture made me realise that Zakayo is no ordinary ‘Ugandan’. From my little medical knowledge, it’s clear from the picture that a medic with a stethoscope was feeling Zakayo’s pulse. Although no BP machine was visible, the pulse reading indicates that perhaps his blood pressure was also measured. With his mouth wide open, a small metal strap was fastened on his teeth, which means that he got some dental checkup too. One of the members of the medical team surrounding him was drawing a blood simple from him which will no doubt be used for extensive investigations in the laboratory. In other words Mzee Zakayo is undergoing full medical examination, a procedure health experts recommend for all individuals who can afford it whether healthy or not, at least once a year.

One of the most memorable lines from George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm is; “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. Zakayo is indeed no ordinary chimp (or ‘Ugandan’, for that matter!). Orwell was satirising the excesses of dictators but the Zakayo story intrigued me both in its literal relevance to the Animal Farm story (Note that in the Daily Monitor picture Zakayo not only has clothes on him, but earlier press reports on him reveal that he eats and ‘sleeps’ like a king.

Several researches show that Ugandan women prefer to deliver from home or by traditional birth attendants than in health centres which are poorly equipped. The result of this is that 20 of them die in labour daily. The other irony of the story is that given the high levels of poverty, few Ugandans can afford an annual comprehensive medical checkup.

To the contrary, Mzee Zakayo, and his ‘colleagues’ at UWEC, director James Musinguzi reportedly told the Daily Monitor, receive annual check-ups “to ensure they are free of diseases that can spread to others”!

No wonder then, that at 49, Zakayo will likely live longer than most (human) Ugandans! (Average life expectancy stands at 50 years according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2012 statistical abstract, with men living to 48 years and women to 52 years).

Bernard Sabiti,
bsabiti@drt-ug.org