Kisoro district leaders have come out to accuse the Office of the Prime Minister of neglecting the district in the current period when its population has more than tripled due to hosting refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The leaders resolved on Monday to petition the OPM, during an emergency meeting between district administrators, the Kisoro hospital top leadership and representatives from Humanitarian agencies.
The meeting discussed among others the recent rise in cases of deaths among refugees.
Dr Ben Rukunda, the Kisoro hospital acting medical superintendent says so far eight children of Congolese origin have died of malnutrition in the last two weeks, while three women have died while in labor.
Dr Rukunda says that due to increased influx of refugees in Kisoro due to the continuing war in the DRC, the hospital has been receiving a big number of malnourished children and women with different health problems.
“Many of the kids being brought here are malnourished, have severe anemia and others malaria,” he said.
“In the last 3 months, the numbers have kept increasing and now we have exceeded our capacity. We’ve unfortunately lost 8 children due to malnutrition in a period of two weeks.”
“This is because the numbers are just too many and patient monitoring is a problem”
Dr Steven Nsabiyumva, the Kisoro District Health Officer, says the workload for health workers has gone beyond capacity due to refugees who get transferred from the Nyakabande holding centre and those in communities.
He said that the majority of the children are dying because they sleep on verandas while they are also hungry .
“The Office of the Prime Minister is partly to blame for this because they have banned some organizations which have been helping the refugees in the community” he said.
On his part, Abel Bizimana the Kisoro district Chairman, said he will not watch on as his people die of poor service delivery due to refugees who have been neglected by the office of the prime minister.
