Hopeless liar named Hopewell
Nevanji Munyaradzi Chiondegwa
Hardly before I had shut off my keyboard, before I could even shut off my smartphone to go to bed, I was pinged by concerned citizens, alerted to a presentation by one Hopewell Chin’ono at The Geneva Convention for Human Rights.
He had made such ostentatious and outlandish claims and thrown such shocking figures that had raised grave concern and they all wondered what government was doing about such claims.
He had declared like a plenipotentiary or maybe a god that Zimbabwe was experiencing maternal mortality of 2500 per year.
His second claim was that there is no functional cancer machine at any of the hospitals in Zimbabwe and the most shocking was that Zimbabwe was losing gold worth $100 million a month through smuggling.
He made other scurrilous claims one shall not dwell on nor even go political as he did.
For what reason he chose the grandest occasion to market the country to make it about slandering, only he knows.
The intention and the results, only time will tell but certainly it does not augur well for the nation except for his pockets.
So certain questions come to mind, is it really possible or feasible that the country really has zero equipment in our hospitals and it is business as usual?
And if so when our leaders read and hear about this are they doing NOTHING about it?
Could it be because of spanners put in place by the opposition, that we cannot import machinery because of sanctions which are real by the way.
In response to these questions, I got a feedback from a person on Facebook who said, “I was at Pari (Parirenyatwa Referral Hospital) last week at the government eye unit. The treatment I got there for a moment I forget I was in Zimbabwe. The place is clean. The service is tops. And the service is free for those 65 and above. This is how ZANU PF will remain in power….what is said on FB is world apart from what is on the ground. People on the ground see what drives them to vote for ZPF while social media has a different story.”
That forced this writer to take a step back and research a little bit on the other issues, especially on health service delivery systems and institutions in Zimbabwe.
Hopewell had shocked with figures and therefore only figures would do and nothing more.
Maternal mortality refers to deaths due to complications from pregnancy or childbirth.
From 2000 to 2017, the global maternal mortality ratio declined by 38 per cent – from 342 deaths to 211 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to UN inter-agency estimates.
This translates into an average annual rate of reduction of 2.9 per cent. While substantive, this is less than half the 6.4 per cent annual rate needed to achieve the Sustainable Development global goal of 70 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
The top 20 of maternal mortality countries in Africa has Zimbabwe missing from that list.
That the countries listed themselves do not have a maternal mortality rate as high as 1500 per year is shocking.
Why Hopewell chose to give a figure that is out of this world only him knows.
If the world averages are below 500 and Zimbabwe’s martenal mortality is in the 400 to 450 range, though classified as high, it is way below the 2500 range claimed by the hopeless liar named Hopewell.
Maternal mortality is by and large related to knowledge and education of people in the health sector and our health sector is one of the leaders in terms of educated personnel.
No wonder why people can leave Zimbabwe and work the next day as nurses in the United Kingdom.
It is generally acknowledged that Zimbabwe has had significant brain drain but this has not stopped the country from manning all its health institutions, another claim of Hopewell’s that falls flat on its face.
It is important to understand how Zimbabwe’s health sector is structured before one makes outlandish claims.
The country has around 1800 health facilities (minus those under construction and to be commissioned) which essentially means that no one is left behind and there is no Zimbabwean who has to travel more than ten kilometres to get health care facility.
Among these 1800 facilities are six Central Hospital which act as the main referral centrers.
These referral centres are then supported by eight Provincial Hospitals which are backed 44 District Hospital and 62 Mission Hospitals some of which act as District Hospitals too.
The rest are made up of clinics in wards and school facilities and so on.
So essentially, a country as small as ours has more than 200 hospitals and more than 1634 primary facilities. That by any standard is huge.
For the smaller hospitals, at least five doctors man them, even in the most remote of locations and every primary facility has at least two qualified nurses.
All of the country’s primary facilities in rural and peri-urban areas have village health workers (“ana mbuya hutano”).
There are at least 20 village health workers for every primary facility and these go into the communities giving health care support and medicines including HIV and TB medication.
The Ministry of Health and Child Care in collaboration with key stakeholders such as Ministry of ICT has deployed computers in nearly 1000 facilities in order to improve health service delivery to the populous.
When it comes to vaccination against COvid-19. numbers do not lie. Our vaccination numbers have been achieved without any funding from outside and that alone compared to our neighbours who have receive international support from multilateral funders is unassailable and worth of praise.
Then there are other successes to speak of and a lot of success story that don’t get told enough. Sally Mugabe has a had a number of complex operations done successfully and these include two siamese twins seperation operations.
At a time when most African countries are still struggling with Oxygen supplies, Zimbabwe moved to open a local plant to supply the country and the region.
Instead of telling the world about these achievements and pleading for the removal of sanctions to enable even bigger progress, Hopewell Chin’ono chose to spread lies and shock.
One could tell from the look of concerns on the faces of his fellow panel members and audience, most of whom were female that he had managed to shock them.
Of course, what woman would not be shocked to hear that women were dying in such numbers amid the claims of such huge amounts of monies being allegedly smuggled out of the country?
A simple search of the internet on stories concerning the construction of maternal wards would have shown that several maternal wards have been built around the country including in Harare.
Hopewell Chin’ono, faithful to his funders intentions, would like Government to focus on Parirenyatwa or only in urban centres at the expense of all of the country’s citizens.
He ignores the 22 turn-key projects to construct 22 hospitals across the nation including one in Chimanimani, Harare South, Bulawayo and Mberengwa which have been completed.
It is sad that after destroying the image of the country, the ruling party ZANU PF and the leadership with false and malicious claims, Hopewell shall except any criminal liability because our Parliament has failed to furnish the legal system with laws to fight such people.
It’s Homeland or Death! Patriotic Act Now!!!!
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