President Mugabe yesterday paid tribute to a team of over 50 medical professionals who successfully performed a delicate operation to separate Siamese twins last Tuesday at Harare Children’s Hospital, saying they did the country proud and deserved to be honoured.
Speaking after visiting the Murehwa twin boys — Kupakwashe and Tapiwanashe Chitiyo at the hospital — President Mugabe also said “I must say I am overwhelmed, so overwhelmed that I cannot express the sensitivity of it all.”
The twins born on April 22 this year to a Murehwa couple were joined from the lower chest to the upper abdomen and shared a liver.
The President said he could not believe the news when he heard that a team of entirely local doctors had successfully separated conjoined twins here in Zimbabwe.
“I said what! We? Zimbabweans? We Zimbabweans struggling under the burden of sanctions, despised in circles of Europe, America — how could we ever have done that? Immense difficulties, vast, vast areas of challenges — where did these doctors really get their learning from?
“Did they really manage to do it? I didn’t believe it, but there it was, the truth of it and I said I must go see this mystery which has happened and see the people who have done it. So I came, I have seen and I am overwhelmed. I say to you congratulations.
Congratulations the entire team,” Mugabe said.
But some critics have already suggested that after this historic operation, President Mugabe should consider stopping “his endless, money draining” trips to Singapore for treatment.
