Nurse Recruitment Fiasco: Public Misled About Online Selection

Health officials said nurses (pictured) are recruited randomly through the MoHCC online system, but this has been proved to be a ruse. Photo by Herald

Editor's note: The first version of this article has been updated to reflect new details that have emerged. 

by Lizwe Sebatha

BULAWAYO — Authorities from the Ministry of Health and Child Care (MoHCC) misled the public about the e-recruitment of students for the government’s nurse training program, an investigation by The Citizen Bulletin has established. 

The probe by the publication paints a stark picture of missteps and failures in the system introduced by government authorities mid-2019 to curb growing corruption implicating senior health officials who reportedly swindled prospective applicants hundreds of dollars to facilitate their admission into the training program. 

Before the e-recruitment system was introduced, student nurses were enrolled in respective nurse training centers across the country, but an audit of the enrollment process the Zimbabwe anti-corruption commission unearthed massive corruption in the system, prompting government authorities to introduce centralize the recruitment program by introduce an e-recruitment system to deal with corruption among other issues.

But it was not long before the new e-recruitment programme managed in Harare, and touted by government authorities as one of the most effective recruitment systems, was condemned again, with some members of the public calling for its immediate abandonment.

Late last year, a few months after the introduction of the new system, activists from Matabeleland and Bulawayo provinces waged protests in local nurse training centres demanding to know why applicants from the aforementioned regions were not enrolled for the training, especially in centres located in their communities. 

They said, in addition to several defects of the online application platform, including its response and process failure; the e-recruitment system only shortlisted applicants from the northern region although prospective trainees from the south-western parts of the country, especially Matabeleland, would have submitted applications for selection. 

In response, MoHCC officials claimed at the time, that the online system selected candidates automatically, an assertion which was shot down by computer experts who, after examining the e-recruitment platform, revealed the system was defective and did not perform basic functions including automatic selection of candidates. 

Robert Ndlovu, a computer expert roped in to probe the online system by activists pushing for fairness in the recruitment process, told The Citizen Bulletin recently that the e-recruitment platform had several malfunctions that made it less reliable, in sharp contrast to what senior officials in the health ministry had made the public believe. 

“Contrary to claims by health officials, the e-recruitment system does not enable a fair selection of candidates.”

“Selection is probably done by someone who operates that ministry’s server,” Ndlovu an expert technologist said, adding that the portal did not even perform basic functions including communicating with extensions such as Ecocash used to make an application payment fee during the application process. 

In December last year, several applicants failed to access and submit their applications through the e-recruitment portal, prompting the public to question the efficiency of the e-system in the selection process. 

Subsequently, MoHCC authorities extended the application deadline as compensation for the system’s failure which had left dozens of would-be applicants stranded after missing the deadline set by the officials. 

The Citizen Bulletin sent several email enquiries to the ministry of health officials requesting to know how the system operates among other issues related to claims that the system automatically selects candidates, but attempts to get a response hit a snag as messages sent were not responded to until the time of publication. 

Health Minister Obadiah Moyo (pictured) refused to comment about the matter. Pic by Newsday

Minister of Health Obadiah Moyo also refused to discuss the details of the e-recruitment programme. However, last year when his ministry was blasted for the clandestine selection of nurse training candidates, Moyo claimed the e-recruitment system was efficient and would address all problems associated with the old system of enrollment. 

But he failed to give satisfactory explanations detailing how the online system operates to ensure that there is a fair selection of applicants based on merit and regional balance, among other factors in accordance with the criteria set by the government. 

Contacted for comment, senior health officials from major nurse training institutions said they were not involved in the new recruitment program and did not know how it was carried out in Harare, the headquarters. 

“The online system is managed at the headquarters and we don’t know how it is done or how it is managed,” Mpilo chief executive officer, Leonard Mabande told The Citizen Bulletin. 

“In the past, there was a team from Mpilo that would play a role in the selection process but it was disbanded because recruitment is now done online,” Mabande added.

Michael Ndiweni, a member of Volunteers Team 2020, an advocacy group supporting prospective students from Matabeleland and Bulawayo to apply for the nurse training program, insisted that candidates were manually, and not automatically selected, contrary to what the public was made to believe by health authorities.

“In December 2019 some students who had paid managed to log in (into the system) but the system was male-default such that when selecting gender, it would automatically mark an applicant male.” 

“We called the gender commission to resolve the matter, and personnel at the ministry of health officials had to change the system manually."

According to Ndiweni, the above scenario was enough proof the e-recruitment system was defective as it did not support automatic selection of candidates. 

Further investigations by this publications surfaced high levels of mismanagement within the health ministry. For instance, applicants who had made it to the interview stage did not receive updates through the e-portal as advised by MoHCC officials at the time of application. 

Instead, the MoHCC posted the update on its official Facebook page, which they first dismissed as a hoax before confirming that it was official. An applicant who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said updates were not posted on the e-portal as per the advice they had been given, another confirmation that the online system is faulty. 

"We never used our e-recruitment log in accounts to get updates," an applicant whose name cannot be revealed for ethical reasons said.

"Instead we only saw updates on Facebook, and we had a torrid time trying to confirm the authenticity of the information as personnel working at the ministry of health denied knowing anything about it. "They eventually confirmed the updates were from their offices."

The e-recruitment fiasco was briefly discussed in the Zimbabwean Parliament recently after some legislators from Bulawayo and Matabeleland, the most affected provinces in the selection process, had been engaged to intervene, but no motion was set for further debate, and the issue instantly suffered a stillbirth. 

Contacted for comment about possible steps legislators would take to ensure the e-recruitment program is administered efficiently, Ruth Labode, Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Health, said the solution was to decentralize the process. 

“E-nursing recruitment under normal circumstances offers credibility as the selection is random. In the spirit of devolution, the recruitment process, e-recruitment included, must be decentralized to central hospitals in provinces, and not be controlled at the head office (Harare),” Labode advised.

“The government's centralized e-recruitment [which] was accompanied by all kinds of confusion must be abandoned and never be repeated."

Last month MoHCC authorities invited successful applicants to attend interviews for the nurse training program in Harare before they later advised candidates coming from outside Harare to attend interviews in training centres closer to them, a move triggered by public calls for the decentralization of the recruitment exercise. 

In a recent report, Volunteers Team 2020 said some of the applicants received text messages from MOHCC authorities containing several errors, a confirmation that human interface in the selection was still unlimited, making the system susceptible to manipulation by personnel within the establishment. 

The report further stated that several applicants from Bulawayo and Matabeleland provinces, including those who had previously been unsuccessful, recently got admitted into the nurse training program. 

Recently, Matabeleland activists under the auspices of Volunteers Team 2020, petitioned Parliament to push for reforms in the recruitment exercise, which they feel is designed to exclude applicants from the region, denying them an equal opportunity for enrollment as enshrined in the country’s Constitution.