Staff at the Rwampara Ebola Treatment Centre in Bunia hardened their strike from Monday 13 July, leaving patients in their beds and burning tyres at the entrance over salaries and bonuses promised during an earlier ministerial visit1. Rwampara is the principal treatment centre for Ituri's provincial capital, the facility that takes the patients the rural posts cannot. Its staff returned conditionally after a day.
This is the escalation of a dispute already on the record. Health workers across Ituri struck over unpaid hazard pay on 9 July, at that stage walking off the job or threatening to. What happened at Rwampara is the next rung: an isolation ward physically abandoned, with confirmed Ebola patients inside it, at a centre that had a responder infected and medevaced to Germany days earlier.
Ituri response officials answered at a press conference in Bunia on Saturday 18 July, pledging to validate personnel lists and digitise the payment system2. They blamed the physical transport of cash to the field and pay-scale mismatches between government and partner staff, and specifically not any shortage of funds. Radio Okapi's account names no official and quotes no salary figure.
That diagnosis is worth taking at face value, because it identifies where this response actually breaks. Donors have pledged close to $990 million since May, and the money reaches Kinshasa; it then has to travel to Bunia as physical cash and be matched against personnel lists nobody has validated. Digitisation fixes a real bottleneck, and it fixes it on a timescale measured in months against an epidemic doubling in weeks.
