November 23, 2008
(Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)
A woman suspected of cholera is brought in a pushcart to a clinic in Harare
Jan Raath in Budiriro township in Harare
There is sewage flowing in the streets, endless mounds of rubbish, a broken water supply – and a cholera epidemic that has Zimbabwe’s Health Minister admitting that he is scared.
This is the grim picture that a team of international statesmen would have seen in this suburb of the capital, had they not been barred from Zimbabwe. It is a picture common all over the country, with the World Health Organisation saying that by late last week about 300 people had died from cholera and 6,000 had been infected. Médecins Sans Frontières, the international health charity, estimates that 1.4 million people are at risk.
According to a senior member of another international medical charity the numbers may be far higher. “The 300 deaths all occurred in hospitals,” the official said. “The number of deaths in the community must be up to 400 per cent higher.”
In six weeks the epidemic has spread to nine out of ten provinces, according to David Parirenyatwa, the Health Minister. “I am scared,” he said. “We cannot control cholera as long as there is no water.”
The situation had been made significantly worse by the heavy rains that had just started, he said. Cholera was being washed into the shallow back-yard wells that were the main source of drinking water.
In the border town of Beitbridge, 50 people have died in the tiny hospital. “The spatial distribution of outbreaks will most likely continue to expand as well as the number of people infected,” the UN predicted.
This weekend Jimmy Carter, the former US President, Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, and Graca Machel, the human rights advocate and wife of Nelson Mandela, pulled out of a visit to Zimbabwe after they were denied visas. The planned trip to Harare was described by the Mugabe Government as “a partisan mission by a group of people with partisan interests”.
“It seems obvious to me that the leaders of the Government are immune to reaching out for help for their own people,” Mr Carter said.
Opposition figures had hoped that such a high-profile visit would have focused international attention on the country’s plight. Zimbabwe’s refusal to let them in showed that the Mugabe regime had something to hide, an editorial in the independent weekly Standard newspaper said.
“The extent to which Zimbabwe’s leaders are prepared to sacrifice lives in order to safeguard their hold on power is unparalleled,” it added. The Government appears to be making attempts to mask the crisis. A polyclinic in Budiriro was surrounded by plastic sheets yesterday and youths in Zanu (PF) T-shirts kept journalists out.
The conditions in Budiriro are echoed in nearly all Zimbabwe’s urban townships, according to a senior health worker. “The country’s entire urban population living in unsanitary conditions is at risk,” he said.
The Health Minister appears to be out of step with the rest of the Government. Two weeks ago Gideon Gono, the Governor of the Central Bank, dismissed demands by health specialists for the cholera epidemic to be declared a national emergency. He told Cabinet ministers that the Government had enough resources to cope.
However, three weeks ago when the disease broke out in Harare, the Beatrice Road Infectious Diseases Hospital turned into a big infection centre. Scores of patients lay on the floors of wards awash in faeces and vomit until aid agencies virtually forced their way in with medication, drips, buckets and mops, disinfectant, water decon-taminants and extra nurses.
Nearly all the drilling of boreholes for communal water pumps and provision of water tanks in the townships is by aid agencies. “The Government has no resources,” the aid agency official said. Committees made up of officials from the Health Ministry, the World Health Organisation and medical charities have been formed to fight against the epidemic. “But no one from the Health Ministry or Zinwa [the Zimbabwe National Water Authority] bothers to turn up,” the official said.
Mr Gono has promised the water authority several million US dollars to equip itself for a big overhaul of water supplies but so far the only sign of it is 28 pickup vehicles. Four of those had to be taken from senior managers who had taken them for their personal use.
Douglas Gwatidzo, chairman of the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights, said that the epidemic would have been brought under control long ago if the finance had been provided. The Standard quoted an anonymous senior official in the water authority as saying: “We were never given any money, we just read about it in the newspapers.”
The Government has even turned the epidemic to its advantage, banning a rally planned in Harare by the Movement for Democratic Change “because of the cholera situation”.
Sick and tired
— Zimbabwe’s hospital system has virtually shut down after walkouts by staff over wages, working conditions and a lack of supplies
— Life expectancy has dropped from 60 years for both sexes to 37 years for men and 34 for women in the past decade
— In April the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights said that the country’s health system was “crippled by dilapidated infrastructure, drug shortages, equipment breakdowns, brain drain and costs of healthcare skyrocketing beyond the reach of the majority of Zimbabweans”
— Last week Zimbabwe’s only medical school closed. It said that it could not function under the prevailing conditions
— Harare's two main state hospitals have shut down maternity services
Sources: agencies, ZADHR, amnesty.org
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