The Sunday Mail
The comments made by University of Zimbabwe’s Professor Marvellous Mhloyi on the Registrar-General’s population statement are interesting. The good professor states that a large population is a recipe for poverty and undermines health, development and political stability.
She holds that the country cannot win the war on poverty reduction if the population is allowed to balloon without control.
Further, she says what the country needs is not a large population, but an optimum one, to avoid the scramble for limited resources. She has no quarrel with the use of current birth control drugs to achieve this.
Well, all these are plausible academic concerns and we have no quarrel with that side of the equation. The problem we see is one of balance. We have to have a balance between the ideal and the practical.
The country’s resources
We all know that the country has an abundance of natural resources, both available and potential. The challenge which is there, even the colonial legacy that we have, is one of exploitation constraints, use and distribution of these resources.
Let us now deal with the downside of the professor’s argument. It is all very well to have a small, well-keeping family. But we have to be broader than this as a country. With the wide spectrum of resources the country has, which has attracted the envy of the world and remains a thorny issue in the country’s relations with its former colonial master, national security becomes a big consideration.
There is no way the country can protect its resources with a handful of citizens. Realistically, we would be swallowed up in one wave of invasion, if it came to that. Let us be practical here and use the example of our liberation war. The one factor that stands out for our victory over whites was our superior numbers, which allowed us to deploy everywhere in the country and the whites could not stretch themselves to the same degree.
So, we were able to overwhelm them in the end. It was inevitable. Could a handful of well-to-do families have accomplished a feat such as this?
What the good professor seems to be saying is that “let us have a prosperous small population and the world would protect us”. Unfortunately, the world is not that way.
For all we know, there are countries out there looking for ways to claim our resources for themselves. This is the practicality of our situation. Academic theories may come very short in that kind of scenario.
There is no one out there who would protect us for nothing. This is why we are advocating a population size that effectively counteracts deaths due to national causes, HIV and Aids, to give the country a positive population growth rate.
This at least gives us a dog’s chance in ensuring the protection of our God-given resources. What is the point in having a small well-looked-after family if you cannot protect its means of survival?
Our population has stagnated for several years now mainly due to the menace of HIV and Aids and natural causes are also taking their pound of flesh.
And if you look at the major players in the exploitation of the country’s mineral resources, you will find that almost all of them are foreigners, with the majority of locals condemned to gold panning in rivers and disused mines. So, who is really benefiting from the country’s population control programmes?
All we are saying is that let us give natural population growth a chance and leave the actual management of births to parents, because they are the ones who know how to space their children vis-à-vis their capacity to support them.
If parents feel that they need to wait before having the next child, there are natural ways they can use to prevent pregnancy that do not take away a woman’s dignity.
Look at the profile of side effects and dangers that women in developing countries are burdened with under these Western-based birth control programmes. They make a frightful reading.
After decades of carrying this burden, what benefit has accrued to developing countries? We can understand colonial governments insisting on controlling the growth of indigenous populations because it was in their interest to do so.
They did not want to be overwhelmed by blacks and having to share the national cake with them. Today, after decades of self-rule, for whose benefit are our women suffering? Surely, a change in our thinking is overdue.
Please let us remember that globally, black people constitute less than 10 percent of the population. If these Western-driven populations control programmes continue to make inroads, the world’s black population will become insignificant by the turn of the next millennium. We are not quarrelling with the good professor. No. We would be the first to expose our limbs to danger to protect her right to speak her mind.
That is what a free country is all about. We all say things we feel are right for our country but sometimes we overlook the other side of the coin a bit too much. The point is not to win an argument. The point is to come with the best solution for our country, and only a debate such as this one will help us to achieve that.
The country has got to be the winner.
