“Astonishingly to people in the West, one out of every two people in the developing world suffers from the diseases carried in their water and food, and an estimated 30,000 people die every day from water-related diseases. Environmental health, or lack of it, thus accounts for about a third of the burden of unnecessary morbidity and mortality in Africa.”
– an excerpt from the book
ARPress is honored to Publish Victims of Ineptitude: An Insider’s Account of Injustice within the World Health Organization by Firdu Zawide and Hilary Bassett. This book is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the ARPress website.
Life rarely moves in straight lines. It loops, stumbles, pauses, rushes forward, and sometimes crashes into moments that change everything. Victims of Ineptitude begins in that quiet space where ordinary purpose meets unexpected tragedy. It is not loud at first. It doesn’t shout for attention. It simply opens with the weight of experience, with the sense that something important happened and someone finally decided to tell it without softening the edges.
Firdu Zawide writes like a man carrying years of memory on his back. There is the memory of service, of long days spent working in difficult conditions, of believing in the promise of global health and collective responsibility. There is also the memory of loss, confusion, and waiting… waiting for answers, waiting for accountability, waiting for a system to do what it claimed it stood for. The book holds these opposing realities side by side. Dedication and disappointment. Purpose and betrayal. Hope and exhaustion.
Firdu Zawide was, until his retirement, an international civil servant for over 23 years. With great pride he served the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Congo/Brazzaville, Geneva and South Africa in the capacity, latterly, of Environmental Health Adviser, African Region. He travelled throughout the continent, supporting the 46 African Member States of the WHO in their struggle to improve the health of their people by providing effective environmental health services. Zawide was born and grew up in Ethiopia. He studied Building Engineering at the Addis Ababa University and Public Health Engineering at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England. Later he was awarded WHO fellowship to study environmental aspect of river basin development in the United States of America, Puerto Rico, and Egypt. He also holds MSc. degree in Environmental Management from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of London. He is a long time Member of the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management and most recently Member of the Chartered Scientist in England. He is also a member of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE} in the United States. Following retirement from WHO service, he is actively engaged in promoting research in Environmental Health and has published several articles in peer reviewed international journals in the area of water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH) and food safety. He lives in the United States. Hilary Bassett is an award-winning writer who lives and works in South Africa. She writes for many leading journals both nationally and internationally and has won awards for her work on drug resistance tuberculosis, stroke and South Africa’s health services. She is the author of ‘The Help Directory’ (Oxford University Press, 1996).
What makes this story powerful is not dramatic exaggeration. It is simple, steady honesty. Zawide does not position himself as a hero. He positions himself as a witness. Someone who saw how easily human lives can become paperwork, how grief can be buried under official silence, how families are left to carry questions that should never have existed in the first place. The emotional weight of the book doesn’t come from big speeches. It comes from small details, from the persistence of memory, from the refusal to let uncomfortable truths fade away.
There is a quiet anger in these pages, but it is not reckless. It is the kind of anger that grows slowly, shaped by years of being unheard. It comes from watching powerful structures protect themselves while individuals are left to pick up the pieces. Yet even with this anger, the book does not lose its sense of care. Zawide still believes in the value of global health work. He still respects the countless workers who put their lives on the line every day. What he questions is leadership without accountability, systems without compassion, authority without responsibility.
The message of the book stretches beyond one incident or one organization. It speaks to a larger truth about how institutions often forget the people they are built to serve. It reminds readers that progress measured only in reports and statistics means little when human dignity is overlooked. It asks uncomfortable questions about power, silence, and the cost of convenience. It challenges the idea that good intentions automatically lead to good outcomes.
There is something deeply human about the tone of Victims of Ineptitude. It doesn’t feel distant or academic. It feels like someone sitting across from you, telling you what they lived through, pausing at certain moments, choosing their words carefully because the memories still matter. The book carries grief, but it also carries stubborn resilience. The kind that refuses to disappear quietly. The kind that keeps writing, keeps speaking, keeps insisting that truth deserves space.
By the time the opening message settles in, the reader understands that this is not just a story about what went wrong. It is about what must be remembered. It is about honoring lives that were lost, acknowledging failures that were hidden, and reminding the world that behind every institutional decision are real people with families, histories, and futures that deserve protection.
In its own quiet way, Victims of Ineptitude asks readers to care more deeply, to question more honestly, and to resist the comfort of indifference. It leaves behind a simple but heavy truth: life is fragile, systems are imperfect, and silence helps no one. What remains is the responsibility to listen, to learn, and to choose humanity even when it is inconvenient.
Victims of Ineptitude: An Insider’s Account of Injustice within the World Health Organization by Firdu Zawide and Hilary Bassett is now available for purchase via the ARPress Bookstore.