One day in March, Yowati Nthenga, the head of accounting at Nkhoma Mission Hospital, was sitting at his desk wondering where he would get the money to pay the hospital’s roughly 400 employees the overtime and bonus pay they were owed. He had paid salaries, fortunately, but staff counted on that additional “allowance,” and it should have gone out already.
Nthenga’s office is near the gate of the rural, 250-bed hospital, which serves a region of about 460,000 people in central ...
