Tanzania’s fragile public healthcare system has been severely damaged by the government’s approach to industrial relations, says a group of religious leaders, opposition politicians, and trade unionists. They are calling on the government to reconsider its decision last week to dismiss 300 striking doctors to try to resolve a long running dispute over pay and conditions.

Tanzania has one of the world’s lowest ratios of doctors to population, with only one trained doctor per 30 000 people, the United Nations Development Programme says, so can ill afford to lose so much of its workforce. In the United Kingdom the proportion is one per 440 people, …