The Sunday Mail
Cholera raises national risk profile
Zimbabwe, alongside several countries in our Southern African region, and more than 19 on the African continent, continues to suffer bouts of cholera outbreaks.
President E.D. Mnangagwa
The worst outbreak was in 2008 and 2009, where we lost over 4 000 Zimbabweans. We had a further major outbreak in 2018, where we lost some lives. Currently, we recorded fresh intermittent outbreaks from February this year, starting in Chegutu.
By the middle of this month of October, our country had recorded over 4 000 cases of cholera in all the country’s 10 provinces, with more than 100 lives being lost.
Manicaland’s Buhera district was the worst affected; outbreaks in Harare’s poorest suburbs are threatening to become endemic.
While the current wave of cholera outbreak has now been brought under control, the mere fact of increased frequencies of such outbreaks, and in both wet and dry seasons, is a cause for grave concern.
Health practitioners attend to people suspected of having contracted cholera recently
The disease’s rapid spread, once it breaks out, is also worrying. All these factors enjoin us to plan and mount broad, strategic interventions to end this public health menace, which raises our country’s risk profile.
Solution beyond drugs, hospitals and clinics
Regarded as easy to cause, and also easy to cure and prevent, recurring incidences of cholera outbreak in our country are an inexcusable indictment on our poor social services delivery record.
This threatens our ambition to become a modern, upper middle-income society by 2030.
Cholera breeds faster under conditions of squalor, in the absence of clean drinking water, and in circumstances of poor hygiene and sanitation. All these point to poverty-related vulnerabilities, which is why we all need to get concerned, and to devise broader interventions beyond the remedial. The lasting solution to chronic cholera outbreaks lies more in our service delivery level than in drugs, hospitals and clinics, themselves interventions of cure after preventive methods have already failed.
All-round urbanisation
Zimbabwe now has a fast-growing urban population. Urbanisation in rural Zimbabwe is also picking pace, with our growth points being foremost beachheads for this phenomenon. Rapidly urbanising growth points are now a common feature in all the eight rural provinces. Sadly, this rapid pace of rural urbanisation has not been matched by the development of modern amenities and infrastructures that deliver clean, safe drinking water, and which ensure modern and efficient reticulation and waste management technologies and systems. Closing this gap is key to guaranteeing viable public health systems for a rapidly urbanising society such as our own.
Backlog in 35 000 villages
Our country comprises 35 000 villages. While great strides have been made in providing safe water points to communities, there is still a big backlog to overcome before we get to that desired stage where all the 35 000 villages have access to clean drinking water, and functional sewer systems. As with urbanisation, this deficit is a key driver to recurring incidences of cholera outbreak in our country.
Poorly run opposition municipalities
Our towns and cities have been run down precipitously, thanks to gross maladministration by opposition-controlled local authorities. Clean and safe drinking water is either unavailable or erratically supplied. Garbage collection services are largely dysfunctional, while broken sewers are a common sight, especially in our high-density suburbs.
To compound it all, unplanned and uncontrolled settlements have created a runaway urban sprawl where uncontrolled human settlements have outpaced the provision of basic services which guarantee public health and essential amenities. Backbone infrastructure for water supply and reticulation in most of our towns and cities is broken, struggling or non-existent.
Global climate change and epidemics
This already bad situation has been exacerbated by the global phenomenon of climate change, which is characterised by low rainfall and excessively high temperatures that make the incubation of communicable diseases more likely and their spread more rapid.
The same phenomenon has translated into an energy supply crisis, particularly in respect of electricity, which is needed to power huge clean water supply systems for our people.
All of the above factors conspire to create the public health crisis, of which the recurring cholera outbreak is a clear manifestation. A comprehensive national response has thus become both needful and urgent.
Clean drinking water to all villages
Now that we have mapped the 35 000 villages in the country, Government needs to speedily roll out a nationwide borehole drilling programme to ensure that each of these 35 000 villages has access to a clean, safe drinking water point that is solar-powered, and to which is attached a community nutritional garden.
Such a countrywide intervention, which should be completed within a year, guarantees the defeat of cholera, while fortifying nutritional levels in all our communities.
This far-flung programme is uppermost during my second term, as part of our Integrated Rural Development Strategy. Together with the ongoing dam construction programme and the development of irrigation projects in every district, we should be able to lift millions out of rural poverty, thus hastening the realisation of our Vision 2030.
Revamping local authorities
While water bodies can be provided to potentially meet clean water requirements for our cities, it has become apparent that such a goal remains a pie in the sky until our local authorities are properly and efficiently run. Water supply crises in most of our urban settlements are not explained by the absence of water bodies; rather, they are explained by water conveyancing systems which are either non-existent, inadequate, inefficient, obsolete and decrepit.
The same goes for uncollected garbage and broken sewer systems. In the absence of a drastic renovation of all our local authorities in the country, Zimbabwe will continue to suffer periodic outbreaks of preventable diseases, in spite of her many unused water bodies.
Government will intervene where necessary
We are completing Gwayi-Shangani Lake; we have started building Kunzvi Dam. Both require efficient, honest municipalities for benefits of such massive water investments to reach each household. Our dysfunctional local authorities have defeated our professed goal of ensuring no one and no community is left behind.
I am happy that the Ministry of Local Government and Public Work is now seized with this challenge of ensuring all our local authorities, regardless of who controls them, become functional and responsive to the public health needs of residents. We have lost enough lives already to hefty public health failures, which could have been prevented by the provision of efficient services and amenities. Government will not hesitate to intervene where local authorities show lacklustre performance, thus endangering our people.
Breakthrough on water-treatment chemicals
I am very happy that research on water- treatment chemicals at one of our applied research-driven universities has made a breakthrough. Bindura University of Science Education is already producing chemicals for water treatment, thus guaranteeing clean and safe water supply to all our urban and rural settlements. Repeated outbreaks of cholera give our country a negative global profile, thus discouraging and undermining our tourism.
Creating matching infrastructures for rural urbanisation
I have already noted the growing urbanisation of our rural areas. This inevitable thrust must now be underpinned by a rapid development of rural infrastructure which guarantee clean and safe water supply, and, of course, an adequate and efficient reticulation system that meets emerging needs of these new settlements. The borehole drilling rigs we have acquired for our water authority, ZINWA, and the ongoing building of more dams, should ensure these burgeoning settlements grow matched and supported.
More health infrastructure
I am happy that part of devolution funds allocated to provincial authorities have been channelled towards the construction of more clinics and health centres. The impact of all this is already telling. We have been able to contain latest outbreaks of cholera faster than we were able to do in 2008 and 2018.
The desired end state is where outbreaks are prevented altogether, as more and more of our communities gain access to modern amenities and facilities. Only that way can we boast real, tangible strides towards Vision 2030.
