KWEKWE - Zimbabwes recession-hit mining sector has bequeathed the nation an unhealthy legacy of closed or downgraded hospitals, leaving redundant workers and peasants from surrounding communal areas with little or no access to health care. (Pictured:Due to high transport costs, relatives are forced to ferry their sick)A modern hospital formerly owned by the Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company (ZISCO) until the parastatal sold it off to concentrate on its core steel making business is crumbling after it was privatized in 1998 as a way to cushion the effects of a creeping recession.
Sister Mary Mukuruva, the sole qualified nurse who is holding fort, said she hardly got any patients.
Our client base has dried up because Ziscosteel only pays its workers an allowance. It does not deduct health insurance contribution and opts to treat its employees in its own clinic, said Mukuruva, who has been with the hospital in Torwood residential suburb since 1981.
Most of the staff left the institution which still boasts a modern operating theatre, children, male and female wards, physiotherapy, kitchen and a mortuary complete with modern machinery when the rot stated settling in.
Cash injection failed
Run jointly as Ben Medical Services with a complex known as the Medical Centre in Redcliff town, both are owned by United States-based Dr. Erikana Chihombori under a US$750 000 project financed by the World Bank.
The modernization project, financed through the Africa Enterprise Fund (AEF) by the International Finance Corporation arm of the Bank, involved the expansion of the hospital and the medical centre by adding an outpatient unit for each to handle an anticipated increase in the number of patients.
The company was expected to install new, modern equipment, an in-house pharmacy, a laboratory, and a radiology department, and to upgrade operating theatres and kitchens.
But an enduring recession has left its mark despite the injection of such a huge sum. The hospital has become an empty casing of unoccupied beds manned by a nursing sister, a pharmacy technician and less than a dozen nursing aides and general hands.
Paint is peeling off the walls and some of the electrical fittings have been ripped out. Most of the curtaining has disappeared from the institution.
We depended on patients with health insurance from the steel making plant, said Mukuruva.
The Medical Centre in the town heavily relies on private doctors bringing in their patients, mostly pregnant women for Caesarian operations.
We get about three patients a week. At most times it is very quite because people are unable to pay cash for services unless one has relatives in the Diaspora who sends them money, a nurse at the Medical centre told The Zimbabwean.
Workers keep their dead
While lack of patients is creating headaches for the two health institutions in the Midlands town, workers left jobless when Alaska Mine, about 140km north of the capital Harare closed, have to put up with keeping their dead for days.
A mortuary on the settlement was shut down when the mine was decommissioned in 1997.
The next function mortuary is 10km away in Chinhoyi provincial hospital.
Residents have formed a fund-raising committee in an effort to revive the mortuary. Our major problem is the high costs of transporting those who die on this settlement to the mortuary, said committee member, Jawet Baison, 53.
The closure of Dalny mines west of Kadoma operated by Falgold for more than 45 years has hit thousands of former workers and their dependants hardest. Before its abrupt closure also in 1997, it employed more than a thousand workers.
“This settlement is dying. It has collapsed along with the health and social services the mine provided,” said Harriet Banda.
Life has never been the same since the mine was shut down. Before the closure, the mine owners ran a hospital and a small clinic. Most of the workers now eke out a living from panning for gold, but that does not provide for their health needs.
When someone falls sick they have to hire vehicles at great cost to the government hospitals in either Kadoma or Chegutu more than 40km away, Banda says.
Elsewhere, Kamativi Tin mine north-west of Bulawayo, Zimbabwes second largest city, shut down in 1985.
The government took advantage of the infrastructure, including a hospital, and turned it into a paramilitary training camp as has Buchwa mine outside Zvishavane, which has since been converted into a compound and training camp for the police.
Greatest tragedy
But the most poignant was the shut down and downgrading of a 100-bed hospital at Gaths Mine asbestos mine run by Shabanie and Mashaba Mines to a clinic in response to plummeting prices on the world market and an anti-asbestos lobby.
Thousands of peasants within a 40km radius were left stranded when company management decided to close the institution because ninety percent of bed occupants at any given time were not mine employees, according to notices distributed to mine workers.
Former owner Mutumwa Mawere opted to ferry the seriously ill almost 100km to a sister mine hospital at Zvishavane and provide transport for relatives to visit their sick three times a week as a cost-cutting measure.
When anyone falls sick, we transport them in donkey-drawn carts 20km to Mashaba, then travel by bus for another 40km to the government provincial hospital in Masvingo, said Dumbura Moyo, a smallholder farmer in the Nyaningwe small-scale commercial farming area.
In the past farmers only needed to get sick relatives to the hospital at Gaths Mine.
Transport was relatively easy to get but these days buses have abandoned the route citing viability problems because passengers they used to carry to the communal lands beyond this area are no longer there, Moyo said.
Post published in: Opinions