Afriquejet.com
1st January 2010
For most Zimbabweans, the re-opening of schools and health facilities, after several years of closure due to the country’s turbulent politics, were the main social highlights of 2009.
As politicians aggressively tussled for power in the last 10 years, Zimbabwe’s economy tumbled, and with it many social services.
Over 20,000 teachers, and 15,000 nurses and doctors, among millions of professional Zimbabweans, fled the country to neighbouring and far-flung countries as the economy sank and political instability took root.
In the last decade, hundreds – possibly thousands – of Zimbabweans died in political violence between supporters of the then government of President Robert Mugabe and the opposition as the two vied for power.
As a result, an estimated three million Zimbabweans emigrated to escape the violence and establish new livelihoods in saner climes. Most of the emigrants were professionals, particularly teachers and medical staff, the two main wings of the civil service.
As a result, thousands of schools as well as clinics and hospitals, particularly in rural areas, were forced to close down, due to staff shortage.
In the health sector, the crisis was made worse by shortages of drugs in both public and private hospitals due to under-funding and lack of foreign currency to import medicines.
Most local manufacturers of drugs, like producers in other sectors, were either swept under by the economic crisis, or they elected to close down.
As a result, enterprising merchants took advantage and started street dispensaries, with all the dangers that this posed. Authorities, unable to provide alternative service, turned a blind eye to this.
But the public paid a heavy price for widespread wrong diagnosis and treatment, and for the crisis in the health sector as a whole.
For example, a cholera outbreak in 2008 killed more than 4,000 people and infected over 100,000 others.
Tariro Gwenzi, a mother of two, is still traumatised by the loss of her twin sister due to a nurses’ strike in 2008. “She died on the bench at the hospital (Harare Hospital in the capital) while doctors and nurses watched,” she said.
The sister had malaria, but this was not picked up by the street ‘pharmacist’ until it developed into celebral malaria.
Gwenzi’s case is far too common in Zimbabwe. And the country’s high AIDS prevailence made the situation even worse.
In the education sector, the impact of Zimbabwe’s long political and economic crisis was devastating, to say the least. Thousands of schools, from primary to universities, closed because teachers had left and due to lack of learning materials.
In rural areas, the situation was made was worse by the food crisis which engulfed the country, forcing hungry children to give up schooling.
But it was the flight of teachers to neighbouring countries which affected the education sector most. Zimbabwean teachers are spread throughout southern Africa, in particular Botswana and South Africa, where they are highly sought after.
However, when the country formed a coalition government in February 2009, and both the political and economic crisis began to ease, both teachers and medical staff started to come back to the country to re-join the services.
In fact, the new government through Education Minister Senator David Coltart made a special appeal, including in neighbouring countries, for Zimbabwean teachers and medical staff to return home with a promise to pay them comparable salaries.
Indeed, thousands took up the call and came back, and teachers and nurses at home who had quit and taken up other better paying jobs also re-joined their professions.
The government further enlisted the help of international relief agencies, such as the United Nations Childrens’ Fund, World Health Organisation and the World Food Programme, to offer incentives to teachers and medical staff.
Donors came up with salary top-ups for both teachers and medical staff, and have given them material asistance such as teaching and learning materials in schools, and drugs and equipment in hospitals.
The result is that virtually all schools and health centres that had closed in the past decade re-opened in 2009, much to the relief of Zimbabweans as a whole, so much so that Gwenzi, though still traumatised by the death of her twin sister, is confid ent of a safe delivery of her third child at Harare
Hospital in February.
“I think it will go well. I feel God is on my side. They (doctors and nurses) are now committed to their work,” she said.