The Sunday News
Michael Mhlanga
Did you know that half of the world’s hospital beds are filled with people suffering from a water-related disease?
In developing countries, about 80% of illnesses are linked to poor water and sanitation conditions. One out of every five deaths under the age of five worldwide is due to a water-related disease. Clean and safe water is essential to healthy living.
Still startled by that, and obviously wondering how those communities are and will cope in the face of coronavirus whose best remedy is water, for seven days in the past week, most of Bulawayo’s high-density suburbs had no running water. The “convenient” reason given by the local government was that it was the “most opportune time” to conduct repairs. How convenient!
The absence of water in Bulawayo with at least a little less or more than a million inhabitants, meant that people could not regularly wash their hands in running water, were exposed to other water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) related outbreaks such as diarrhoea and cholera which we struggle to contain every time and definitely social distance was a mirage as we push and shove at the communal borehole, if ever it functions. The local Government became a threat to the residents.
It is important to highlight to the local authority that the adage of “water is life” is currently as literal as it may get. The only option of surviving the coronavirus is washing hands because most people barely afford alcohol based sanitisers, yet water became alien.
At a time where the City Council’s actions are purely informed by engineering, it overlooks the social fatalities. This is a matter of the value of life threatened by the absence of water and the quadrupling of public health hazards that may accompany coronavirus explosion. If Covid-19 does not attack, diarrhoea, typhoid and cholera would, we are always between a hard place and a rock. The evaluation done by the local authority baffles the mind.
It has become popular knowledge that the lack of safe water, functional toilets, and handwashing facilities in vulnerable and poorly “infrastructured” communities poses significant health risks to residents. The ongoing global problem of the coronavirus has highlighted the consequences of the lack of water and sanitation facilities and practice of key hygiene behaviours. Coronavirus is a problem that requires a comprehensive strategy, including WASH improvements, to prevent emergence and transmission. Hand hygiene has been cited as the single most important practice to reduce the hazard of the pandemic, and improved hand hygiene practices have been associated with a sustained decrease in the incidence of infections in healthcare settings.
Global statistics inform that one in three people still lack access to hygienic sanitation facilities including 946 million people who defecate in the open, increasing the risk of exposure to faecal pathogens for themselves and members of their communities. An estimated 81% of the world’s population does not wash hands with soap after contact with excreta (use of a sanitation facility or contact with children’s excreta).
The proportion of the population with a handwashing facility with soap and water in the household is less than 50% in most sub-Saharan countries. This lack of WASH services undermines the ability to provide safe, quality healthcare, and places both those providing and those seeking care at risk.
This lack of access to water and sanitation, and poor hygiene behaviour has major health impacts. Aside the threats of Covid-19, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 842 000 deaths from diarrhoeal diseases each year could be prevented by improved water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Studies on the health impact of handwashing behaviour have also reported reductions in pneumonia (50%), flu (40%) and infective conjunctivitis (67%).
Basic hygienic practices by birth attendants and new mothers can reduce the risk of infections, sepsis and death for infants and mothers by over 15%.
The ravaging ebola epidemic in West Africa and periodic outbreaks of cholera on multiple continents have highlighted the devastating consequences of the lack of WASH facilities as a first line of defence for communities.
In 2017, a colleague, Richard Mahomva once unpacked the critical themes and architecture of Prof Muchaparara Musemwa’s publication, Water, History, and Politics in Zimbabwe: Bulawayo’s Struggles with the Environment, 1894-2008. Indeed, the book is game changing as far as casting and posture of the tradition of historiography in Zimbabwe is concerned. It is one of the key thesis that can be used to analyse Bulawayo’s hydro politics from multiple lenses. It is again in that seminal text that we are reminded that water and its significance in sustaining social policy and the political economy of a country is a critical aspect of every human experience and livelihood. As such, the study of anthropology and history cannot be relevant if it does not pay accurate and valid attention to the importance and effects of water in sustaining human livelihoods and interest be it social, political and economic interests.
As argued by Mahomva (2017), Musemwa’s study is critical as it is inclusive of the importance of water as a commodity which catalyses any community’s development. What is far-reaching about this intellectual posit is the use of Makokoba as case-study whose place in post-colonial social-science discourses epitomises the coloniality of power which begs the need to rethink policy formulation and implementation in post-independence Africa. “Makokoba is a space of colonially underpinned resource distribution not only in Bulawayo, but in Zimbabwe and in Africa at large. The water scarcity horrors faced by Makokoba are an illustrative exclamation of the overall pitfalls of ‘what ought to be’ social-policy and distribution of public goods in Zimbabwe.” (Mahomva, 2017)
What Mahomva analysed then, can be invited into today’s discussion as that Makokoba being a “punished” and neglected space represents the vulnerability of the poor in this city whom for decades have continually been neglected by the local authority yet they are the most vulnerable in public health specs.
The policy crisis in Makokoba, which is the case-study of Muchemwa’s book, and a representation of our high density and poverty stricken neighbourhoods is far suggesting of a history that Bulawayo needs to confront truthfully with no selective sensation to detail and feeding into the interests of protecting residents from public health hazards that the city will fail to contain.
The subject of water and its importance in sustaining human livelihood is outstandingly significant in understanding the history of resource distribution.
