By Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu

CONTINUOUS demographic changes, coupled with a negative economic trend in Zimbabwe’s urban and peri-urban areas since the attainment of independence in 1980, have created an environment conducive to the occurrence of infectious diseases such as typhoid and cholera.
Both those ailments have claimed lives, with cholera alone being responsible for 4 300 deaths in 2008. There have been fatal typhoid episodes in a couple of towns, but nothing as frightening as cholera, thousands of whose patients have recently flooded a Harare infectious diseases hospital.
Causes of those two maladies, cholera and typhoid, should be understood in the context of Zimbabwe’s cultural as well as the country’s political and security dynamics.
Zimbabwe’s urban centres demographically changed drastically as the liberation war spread in the country’s rural areas. Two important social developments occurred:
– A fairly large number of people who had been normally resident in the rural areas moved to urban and peri-urban centres to seek relative security;
– Many school-going children and young adults left their homes to join the armed struggle in Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Botswana.
Some of the people of the first category returned to their rural homes soon after the country became independent in 1980, but a larger number opted to live in the urban centres because life was easier and more comfortable there than in the rural areas.
They accessed social service such as education, as well as material comforts and varied entertainment in the urban areas much more easily than in the rural areas.
When the country became independent in April 1980, the majority of former combatants chose to live in urban centres where employment and education opportunities were much more assured than in the rural areas.
Some individuals and families decided to buy or build houses in urban centres.
Others maintained nominal rural homes.
Those developments drastically changed Zimbabwe’s urban demographics as well as the country’s capacity to deliver adequate social services in those centres.
The urban social infrastructure and social services personnel were over-stretched, resulting in schools running two streams; one in the morning, and the other in the afternoon (hot-sitting).
Clinics and hospitals experienced a more or less similar strain as beds and blankets became unavailable, resulting in many patients sleeping on floors or using their own bedding material in some hospitals.
Other vital health facilities that could not stand that demographic development were toilets, the sewerage disposal and the water reticulation systems.
In addition to the already stated factors that drastically increased Zimbabwe’s urban population, putting a strain on the urban areas’ social infrastructure, the country’s secondary, polytechnic colleges and universities churn out thousands of graduates yearly all of whom head for and live in urban or peri-urban centres.
That continuously worsens the situation as there are no Government or municipal councils employment-generating programmes for those school leavers and graduates as would have been the case in a socialist state.
On top of all these factors, Zimbabwe’s population increases naturally at about 3,5 percent annually. The country does not have a population growth control policy.
The recurrence of any of these two diseases should be considered on the basis of disorderly poverty-spawning socio-economic background of urban populations, many of whom can hardly pay municipal rates.
Some towns have councils whose service-delivery priorities are in many cases cock-eyed, and whose accountability to the public is non-existent at worst, and suspect at best.
If most of Zimbabwe’s municipal councils’ priorities were well-thought-out, renovation at most or repair at least of water reticulation and sewerage systems should be on top of their development agendas.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email. sgwakuba@gmail.com