The Sunday Mail
This is the second of a three-part series by Tobaiwa Mudede and Richard Hondo’s on why they oppose certain birth and population control methods. Let us tell you a story entitled “When the lion was ill”, which the older generation may be familiar with. The king of the jungle was going through a lean spell and had gone hungry for some time and needed something to eat.
He had no strength to hunt. So, he hatched a plan. He feigned illness and asked all the other animals to come and see him in a dark cave where he had taken refuge. And so the animals came and formed a beeline to enter the cave. The last animal to arrive on the scene was Hare.
He studied the scene and discovered that all the footprints of the visiting animals were pointing in the same direction, into the cave, and none the opposite direction. Hare said to himself, “This is odd. Why are there no footprints for animals returning from the cave? Something ought to be the matter here!”
Hare realised that Lion was eating his visitors in the cave. He promptly ran away, and so saved his life.
When is someone going to make a similar observation and save women from this drug-propelled birth-control programme?
All of us as citizens, including Professor Marvelous Mhloyi, have a professional duty to care in our professional lives. It could be in guiding those who may look at us for guidance in our different pursuits, or contributing to national debates, or protecting vulnerable groups from harm.
We are the cogs in the national wheel, each contributing a particular skill for the system to work.
Remove one cog and the whole system is compromised.
Imagine a legal representative failing to turn up in court to defend his or her client in a matter of life and death and the judge having to wait for the no-show, or a medical practitioner who will prescribe a dangerous drug omits to inform the patient of the associated side-effects of the drug, or ask if the patient was allergic to such a drug, or a company accountant who will not produce financial statements to show whether or not the company is making money, or a motor mechanic who certifies a repaired vehicle fit for use without checking it, or a soldier who goes to war without checking if his gun has bullets, or an advisor to a head of state who hides vital information.
The consequences of such lack of duty of care would be catastrophic to say the least. A whole nation can suffer irreparable damage, just like what happened with Esap in the case of Zimbabwe.
When we are sitting under the shade of a tree today, we have to remember that someone had the foresight to plant a tree a long time ago.
We thank such people even if we do not know them personally. We are not sure on what premises the professor is defending the current birth control drugs. This “small family, better life” argument has a familiar ring to it.
We remember it being a trademark of the family planning facility near Harare Central Hospital during colonial rule, called Spilhaus.
The question of birth-related mortality among women should be properly contextualised to avoid misinformation. It is not a symptom of repeated deliveries as the professor seems to paint it as, nor is it a manifestation of unplanned pregnancies.
It occurs in any pregnancy, planned or unplanned, and irrespective of whether the pregnancy came after a long break or after a short one.
From available statistics, first pregnancies seem to have higher risks.
But the point is, deaths occur when certain complications arise, such as breaches, when the baby is not aligned with the cervix, or as a result of lack of duty of care on the part of health care givers, or when appropriate resources are in short supply at the delivery facility.
The professor seems to be saying that it is giving birth per se that accounts for birth-related deaths among women, conveniently ignoring the avoidable deaths that are caused by the side-effects and cancers that are induced by birth-control drugs.
There is no way the American black women would have won their lawsuit if the purported damage they suffered was but a facade.
We feel the good professor is hiding behind a thin veil here.
This is a punch under the belt to say the least. As an enlightened woman herself, Prof Mhloyi should be spearheading efforts to spare women the burden imposed by these drugs, rather than advocate their continued use in the interest of small families, whose benefits have failed to ramify to the basic woman in the rural areas since Spilhaus was built many decades ago.
Another below-the-belt punch the professor has thrown is the example of Nigeria she gave.
To say that the trouble that Nigeria has is because of its large population (170 million people), which is fuelling conflict among its people as they compete for scarce resources is fraught with danger.
We have witnessed internal conflicts even in less populated countries, Lesotho, for example.
Internal conflicts will always occur when irreconcilable differences emerge between people.
Scuffles for resources also do occur even where the population is below optimum, because it is in the nature of people to try and have the best of everything to the exclusion of others, whether they are part of a large population or not.
Skirmishes for resources have nothing to do with the size of a country’s population, otherwise a country like India, with a population density of 376 people per square kilometre (more than tenfold that of Zimbabwe) would be in perpetual turmoil.
They have everything to do with vested interests, usually fuelled from outside. Human greed is what it is. Prof Mhloyi seems to think that bigger disposable incomes that arise from small families are the cure. She forgets that the more you have, the more you crave for.
Also, it is in the nature of humans that the moment your neighbour has something that you do not have, you begin to crave for it, simple, otherwise there would be no adultery in this world. There is just no cure for this disease called greed, please note.
This is why it is not even part of national planning in the Ministry of Health!
To expose the myth of “small family, better life”, let us use the very country that Prof Mhloyi has used, Nigeria.
The physical size of Nigeria is not terribly different from that of Zimbabwe, but carries a population nearly 18 times that of Zimbabwe. This is not all.
A recent article on Nigeria in The Herald indicated that the economy of Nigeria may soon, if not already, be the biggest in Africa! Where does this leave the professor’s theory on small families?
On the basis of available evidence, that of Nigeria included, we remain convinced that the economy of a country expands in tandem with the natural growth of its population, because the people are the driving force, otherwise countries like Nigeria would have suffered a Spenglerian demise long back.
For the benefit of our student readers, the term Spenglerian is derived from a historian called Spengler, who, like his contemporaries such as Toynbee, saw history not as the story of a series of one-off events, but as the story of a connected flow of events.
Thus, if we are talking about the story of a people, you will have their beginning, their rise, their peak, their decline, and finally their demise.
If Prof Mhloyi’s assertion about Nigeria held water, Nigeria would fit into this Spenglerian model as many civilisations have done before our time.
The Jews are another example, their story being very familiar with most Christians.
They have been in existence for more than 4 000 years now, starting from the time of Abraham.
Succeeding civilisations have dispersed them, enslaved them, killed them, and in the last World War, Hitler actually tried to wipe them off the face of the Earth but he failed to.
Their secret? They never practised birth control, despite not having a country of their own most of the time for more than 4 000 years! In fact, Jewish law did not allow birth control.
It is quite possible that if they had lived in accordance with Prof Mhloyi’s “small family, better life” theory, the Jews would be an extinct race today.
But no, they are very much alive. What more, there is a Jew in every country of the world today. And as a group, Jews control in the region of three-quarters of the world’s wealth!
There is self-preserving strength in numbers, no doubt, and economic power too, we might add.
It is people who create wealth, not the other way round.
