There will be a general strike by doctors starting on Monday the 5th - the Mozambican Medical Association has announced. Doctors feel wronged and humiliated by the notorious Single Salary Scale. Poor doctors - almost all the colds and fevers from this unbearable scale have fallen on their shoulders.

And then the Minister of Finance appeared on TV, purring that the government, even without a medical course, was going to do a little surgery on the salary scale. So far, nothing has been done and the doctors will hang up their stethoscopes and watch the World Cup in Qatar in their homes, while patients with tuberculosis, cancer and malaria fight for access to the final rooms in the metal beds of the hospitals.

It's a doctors' strike against the monkey politics of our government, but it's the people who will suffer in the midst of it all. I've never seen the government lying on the concrete benches of Mavalane Hospital with health care reduced to a prescription in its hand, I've never seen the government being thrown out of hospital corridors screaming like a dog by the cleaning ladies.

Yesterday it was the teachers who abandoned their classrooms - leaving the students with long exclamation marks on their heads. And on Monday it will be the doctors who will be scrambling for the back doors of the hospitals with boxes of medicines fleeing from the sick. On Monday it will be the doctors who pile into hospital corridors waiting for intensive care from the government.

I don't know what will become of the children who rock their childhoods in pediatrician's beds, of the inpatients who are obese from IVs and dizzy from pills, of the mothers in maternity wards who are unable to turn breast milk into IVs for their unborn babies, of the patients reduced to bones rotting with mold waiting for the doctors to visit them in the emergency room. What will become of them?

I've never seen the government fighting over the unsalted soup in the hospitals where two slices of carrot float like swimmers on each plate, I've never seen the government hospitalized in José Macamo's stained sheets and watching the world end over a metal headboard with a thermos of tea, a banana and a packet of Maria cookies. I've never seen the government come back shirtless and say to the doctor: "I feel a twinge near my heart, doctor".

Of course, the government always promises to do an in-depth analysis of doctors' salaries, but in the end it puts a small prosthesis of yellowish subsidies like malaria patients. It would be good if the government did an X-ray of doctors' salaries.

Yesterday the President of the Republic said that teachers shouldn't give the government a headache, and today it's the government that's giving doctors a headache. On Monday, the people will feel pangs close to their hearts and there will be no doctor to listen to them, because the government never listens to the doctors' pangs close to their hearts.