The Sunday Mail
Edwin Mwase
Living or passing through a border town can evoke different emotions in different people. To refugees fleeing war and anarchy, a border town can be a gateway to a better and secure future.
For Zimbabweans, the border towns are now synonymous with the spread of HIV and the ravages of Aids.
Statistics released by the National Aids Council (NAC) revealed that Zimbabwe’s border towns continue acting as breeding grounds to the pandemic.
The large numbers of people who pass through border towns as they trade or look for greener pastures in neighbouring countries has resulted in commercial sex becoming big business in the areas.
As a result, border towns have been transformed from business hubs to breeding grounds of sexually transmitted diseases,especially HIV and Aids.
Appearing before the Parliamentary Thematic Committee on HIV and Aids recently, the NAC chief executive officer, Dr Tapuwa Magure, said although the HIV and Aids prevalence rate was decreasing countrywide, the rate remains high in Matabeleland South, Bulawayo and Matabeleland North where it currently stands at 21,19 and 18 percent respectively.
Most people in these areas occasionally commute to Botswana and South Africa.
Dr Magure said the high prevalence rate in border towns can be attributed to prostitution and cross-border activities.
“In terms of the actual numbers, Harare has the highest number of people who are infected, followed by Manicaland, Midlands, Mashonaland West, Mashonaland East, Masvingo, Mashonaland Central, Matabeleland South and North,” he said.
According to NAC, Mashonaland East has a 16 percent prevalence rate followed by Mashonaland West and the Midlands provinces with 15 percent prevalence rates respectively.
Manicaland, Mashonaland Central and Masvingo are on 14 percent each whilst Harare has a 13 percent prevalence rate.
Looking at the statistics, it can be argued that the country is, to some extent, facing challenges in combating the HIV and Aids scourge in the border towns.
Zimbabwe has, however, managed to reduce the prevalence rate from a peak of 29 percent when the first HIV and Aids case was reported in 1985, to the current rates of about 15 percent.
Mr Amon Mpofu, the NAC monitoring and evaluation director, said there was a need for the initiation of programmes that seek to prevent the spread of the disease in the Southern region.
“There are close to 1,4 million people living with HIV and Aids in Zimbabwe. Of that number, 963 000 are in need of anti-retroviral therapy in line with the World Health Organisation’s new guidelines of initiating treatment when the CD4 count drops to 500,” he said. Mr Mpofu said there were about 76 000 new infections annually while about 46 000 people are estimated to die from HIV and Aids every year.
A cross-border truck driver, Mr Edward Manoko, said the major problem in border towns emanates from commercial sex workers who hunt for truck drivers.
“If you look at the country’s highways leading to the country’s major borders, the trends are the same from Beitbridge, to Plumtree and Chirundu,” he said.
“This has resulted in the development of prostitution-fuelled settlements, like the one at the Bubi Trucking Rest, some 60 kilometers from Beitbridge along the Masvingo-Beitbridge highway. An informal settlement that houses commercial sex workers has sprouted.”
He said the situation was the same at Chirundu border post where another settlement known as Baghdad has been set up by the sex workers.
Another truck driver, Mr Mtokozisi Mafu, said trucking companies must encourage their drivers to travel with their spouses. Some sections of the society have called on the authorities to empower women in these areas so that they will not be drawn to prostitution.
Ms Nyaradzai Changamire- Hokonya, a health rights advocate at the Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network (ZWRCN) said it has been observed that efforts to empower local women in border towns will not come to fruition as the majority of the sex workers in these areas are not usually from the border towns themselves.
“They come from faraway places and are lured to these towns by money,” she said.
Ms Changamire-Hokonya said there was a need for an increase in sexual health clinics which provide some reproductive health services at most border towns.
Ms Evince Mugumbate, the Zimbabwe’s Women and Aids Support Network (WASN) information manager, said that border towns are the melting pot for people from diverse backgrounds in pursuit of economic emancipation, hence it was difficult to rein-in prostitution activities.
“We have rolled out some outreach programmes in Beitbridge. It came to our attention that in pursuit of quick money, most women would rather cede their bargaining power when it comes to matters of protection in sexual issues,” she said.
Ms Mugumbate said most of the women had confirmed that they engage in unprotected sex which guarantees them more money.
“However, it is encouraging that we are getting a positive response in behavioural change from these communities as we continue to conscientise them about the dangers of indulging in unprotected sex,” she said. Activists have been calling for behavioural change as the best way of effectively combating HIV and Aids.
Prevention remains the pillar of HIV interventions in Zimbabwe.
The behavioural change programme focuses on reducing key risk sexual behaviours, in particular multiple and concurrent sexual partners, low risk perception as well as other underlying vulnerability factors such as imbalanced gender relations, stigma and discrimination and risky cultural and religious practices.
The behavioural change programme continues to be an instrumental tool in creating demand for the uptake of HIV prevention services in support of the endeavour to reach universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support in the aforementioned areas.
