The Sunday Mail
Tobaiwa Mudede & Richard Hondo
We see that the Professor is still breathing fire at us. We can live with that. Although the natural response to fires is to douse them, we want to leave hers burning, to give the debate a chance to provide pointers. After all, her right and ours to indulge in words is guaranteed in the Constitution.
Looking through her latest article, it is very revealing that Prof Mhloyi has adopted a selective approach. She completely avoided reference to the topical issue, the lawsuits by black women in the United States of America, against the manufacturers of the birth control drugs that we mentioned in our first response to her original article on the topic of population control.
The women actually won their case and were awarded millions of US dollars for the suffering they were subjected to by these drugs!! Who will compensate Zimbabwean women for the continued use of the same drugs? Also missing from her responding article is the fact that some judges in the USA sentence women to use Depo-Provera and Norplant when found guilty in child-related offences.
Does this qualify as a choice on the part of the affected women? Oh please, let us be a little more open to facts.
For the benefit of those readers who may have missed our first responding article, we said that the current birth-control regimes are not giving the black woman safe choices at all. They are a rigid imposition through and through.
We asserted that there were quality choices that both men and women could adopt, choices offered by mother nature herself, which have no known side-effects. Prof Mhloyi herself mentioned one of these, withdrawal. Another window is confining sex to the non-fertile periods of a woman’s fertility cycle.
These choices actually preserve a woman’s reproductive health and engender a restrained, responsible and disciplined approach to sex. Yes, accidents can happen with these natural methods, resulting in unplanned pregnancies, but the same is equally true with the drug-driven methods, which are worsened by a multiplicity of deadly side-effects.
Prof Mhloyi concedes that these “nature’s way” birth-control methods existed before colonialism in Africa and were used by our forefathers, but she is quick to say, “Modern birth control methods only enhanced contraception, just the way automobiles revolutionised transportation”.
Please allow us to put this into perspective, if we may. When colonial settlers arrived in this country, they did not find it “overpopulated”, despite there being no birth-control drugs in use. The population had been growing nature’s way. What the good professor is saying in effect is that this “nature’s way” pace was “too fast” and needed to be slowed down via enhancement by drugs, otherwise why would anyone want to change a satisfactory process?
That is where we differ essentially, comrades and friends, trying to control a process which is already slow! What we are saying is that, yes, the coloniser had every reason to curtail the black population during his reign, and employed the fear game that too many children would deplete resources to a failing point, but this ploy is out of tune now and we need to remove these hazardous drugs from the market and let us promote natural methods.
All we need to do now is bring back the same faith that our forebears had in nature’s ways.
In nature’s way, both men and women make a contribution to child spacing.
There is no doubt that the methods promoted by the good professor place the whole burden of child spacing on the woman, who thus suffers alone as the drugs’ terrible side-effects exact their pound of flesh. Where is the equity that Prof Mhloyi is talking about in this scenario?
We see a similarity between the professor’s insistence on drug-driven population control programmes and that disaster of yesteryear, Esap, the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, that was imposed on the country, with the full support of our noted economists.
Glowing promises were made as to the suitability of the programme for Zimbabwe, promises of massive job creations, better life for everybody, etcetera. But a couple of years after implementation of the programme, the noted proponents started to disappear from the scene one by one, and by the end of the programme five years later, not one of them was to be seen or heard about.
This is the problem with Western-driven programmes. People sometimes support them for personal reasons, not for national reasons. And when things go wrong, as they often do in these situations, the proponents disappear, not wanting to own up!
As a result, the country is pushed back to square one, with terrible suffering of the people, and no one takes responsibility for the disaster. The lesson here, ladies and gentlemen, is that our detractors employ long-term planning, which ensures that when consequences start emerging, there will be no one to confront.
Sadly, we do not seem to grasp this, blinded as we sometimes are by vested interests. We do not realise the degree of silent suffering the black woman has to contend with in these drug-driven birth control programmes, sadly.
In our particular approach to birth control, husband and wife share the responsibility of child spacing as we said, and that in the same way that husband and wife agree to use these Western drugs in the scenario that Prof Mhloyi presents, they can also agree to adopt natural methods.
What’s wrong with giving people a real freedom of choice, or offering them a safer alternative? What the professor seems to be suggesting is that people are inherently irresponsible if left to their own devices; you have to coerce them into doing the right thing, otherwise they muck up things for everybody, and everybody here means those deriving benefit from the status quo.
We know that millions and millions of dollars are being poured into the drug-driven birth control programmes, donor funds included, but no funding is available for programmes that foster natural ways of population control. Is something not the matter here? If these millions were being used to promote safer ways, wouldn’t the reproductive health of our womenfolk be better than it is?
A very disturbing observation is that we do not see the women of other races featuring in these drug-driven programmes. Is there no need to control their fertility as well? Why is it that only the black woman is being targeted? Why is it that caucasian women in the USA are not sentenced to take birth control drugs when found guilty of the same offence as their black counterparts?
And Prof Mhloyi says there is no conspiracy or a bigger picture on the part of the pushers of drug-driven birth control programmes!
Well, we were not born yesterday, unfortunately for her. We can clearly read between the lines.
◆ To be continued next week
