Zimbabwe: Womens’ Lives Cut Short
AIDS epidemic and failed government policies are blamed for women’s
plummeting life expectancy.
By Roselyn Godobori in Harare (AR No. 97, 27-Feb-07)
At 18, Abigail Murewa
is already a mother. She has no income and dropped out of school before
completing the basic eleven years of schooling. Her pretty face and her direct
stare haunt anyone who looks at her and the malnourished baby strapped on her
back.
One thing is certain: she is likely to be dead by the time her son
is aged just 16. According to the United Nations' World Health Organisation,
WHO, the life expectancy of Zimbabwean women by early 2006 was only 34 years,
down from 36 in 2004 and 62 in 1990.
Thirty-four: an age where women in
stable democracies are thinking about careers, starting families, or buying
homes. While they look towards their bright futures, Zimbabwean women face only
a painful cruel death.
Thirty-four is by far the lowest life expectancy
in the world. Even in war-torn Iraq, said WHO in its report, women can expect to
live to the age of 51, and 42 in Afghanistan. In poor countries like Cuba and
North Korea, women's life expectancy is 75 and 65
respectively.
Inscriptions on the headstones of hundreds of graves at the
fast-filling Granville cemetery in Harare tell a harrowing tale about life
expectancy in Zimbabwe, where an alarming 3,500 citizens a week die from
HIV/AIDS, higher than the overall death rate in Darfur where Sudanese government
forces are accused of genocide.
The black metal plates with
white-painted birth dates are symbolic of the mounting nationwide death toll. In
one row, the plates read Sibongile Sibanda born 5 March 1981; Mary Muzanenhamo
born 16 June 1983; Gloria Masawi born 1 November 1979 and Agnes Marimo born 5
October 1977. They all died in December last year.
A report headlined
"Most Harare cemeteries almost full" in the state-run daily Herald newspaper
said a critical shortage of burial space was looming in the capital city, as
most cemeteries were almost full owing to high mortality. It quoted a town
planning department report, which noted that the tree main burial places in
Harare, Mabvuku, Warren Hills and Granville cemeteries, were filling up at such
a fast rate that there will be no burial plots available before the end of
2007.
David Coltart, a member of parliament for the opposition Movement
for Democratic Change, said this was just the tip of an iceberg. “Cemeteries are
filling up throughout the country. But no blood is being spilt - people are just
fading away, dying quietly and being buried quietly with no fanfare - and so
there is little international media attention," he said.
Zimbabwe,
together with South Africa, used to have one of the highest life expectancy
rates in Africa. At independence in 1980, life expectancy for women was 60
years, peaking at 62 in 1990, when Zimbabwe had one of the finest public health
systems in Africa.
Since 1990, the decline has happened at a frightening
rate. By the end of 2000, the year Mugabe launched his violent invasions of
commercial farms that were the engine of the economy, women's life expectancy
was down to 44. The most recent data was collected two years ago, and WHO
officials admit off the record to their fear that women's life expectancy may
dip below thirty years of age by the end of 2007.
Zimbabwe and its people
are suffering multiple crises, so there are numerous reasons for the plunge in
women's life expectancy.
Critics say the low life expectancy cannot be
solely blamed on the AIDS epidemic. Failed government policies in all areas are
also responsible.
Shari Appel, of the Solidarity Peace Trust, a
non-governmental humanitarian organisation, said, “The health system has totally
collapsed. Now access to education is going the same way and girls are the first
to miss out. In the overcrowding, domestic violence and sexual abuse are
rife."
The government's reaction to what amounts to a vast cull of its
people has been deeply callous. Didymus Mutasa, the minister of state security,
said when asked about the accelerating death rate, "We would be better off with
only six million people (less than half the population level in 2000), with our
own people who support the liberation struggle (meaning supporters of the ruling
party). We don't want all these extra people."
Coltart said the economic
meltdown - Zimbabwe has the fastest declining economy in the world, with
unemployment running at more than 80 per cent - and the food crisis were central
to women's low life expectancy. WHO put its estimate of Zimbabwean men's life
expectancy rate in early 2006 at 37 years, and declining.
In some
countries with proper health care and access to anti-retrovirals, ARVs, HIV
sufferers can now live with the disease for decades. But Zimbabwe’s health
system has all but collapsed.
Pledges of free ARVs from the government
contrast with the reality of corrupt, incompetent and threadbare health care
even for those with money - for those without it is completely out of reach.
State clinic dispensaries are empty and the brain drain has seen thousands of
qualified nurses and hundreds of doctors quit the country. Even dying comes at a
cost. Families wanting to collect a relative's body from hospitals must provide
a coffin to claim them. Many can no longer afford this.
Coltart, a white
Zimbabwean who was one of the most prominent critics of Zimbabwe's former white
minority Rhodesian government, said, “The pathetic amounts spent on ARV
medication by a government that is more concerned about importing military
aircraft from China than it is in protecting the lives of its people have a
telling effect on how long the people can expect to live." Among other factors,
he said, were the forcible displacement of some 700,000 of the urban poor in
Mugabe's notorious Operation Murambatsvina (Operation Drive Out the Trsh) and
malnutrition among millions of people as a result of the collapse of the
agricultural system in a country was known as the breadbasket of
Africa.
At the centre of the catastrophe is the destruction of the
country’s entire social fabric. The institution of marriage has been wrecked as
family spouses go different ways in search of livelihoods. More than 3.5 million
Zimbabweans live outside the country. While one spouse, usually but not always
the woman, stays back home to look after the children, the other goes into the
diaspora to supplement the family income. Living separately means the two often
have other sexual partners, exposing both to HIV infection.
Stories of
young women taking on boyfriends in the absence of their men are
harrowing.
Tafadzwa Muswe, who lived in Harare’s densely populated
working class suburb of Mbare, died two weeks before her thirtieth birthday. To
supplement her meagre income, she had joined friends who date older and more
prosperous “sugar daddies”. Her various sugar daddies helped to keep her
eight-year-old child clothed, fed and educated. They also paid her rent, which
was four times her income. They showered her with gifts and jewelry, but
unfortunately also infected her with HIV.
With no access to ARVs, her
friends and relatives watched Tafadzwa Muswe fade away and die.
Although
Memory Nyoni, another young woman, also died young from AIDS, her story is
different from that of Tafadzwa. She was married to a man who was forced to
migrate to neighbouring South Africa to try to earn an income that would enable
him to send his kids to good schools, feed and clothe them and do other things
that a good father likes to do. But because of the long absences, both had
strings of sexual relationships that brought HIV into their home.
Both
Memory and Tafadzwa were victims of Zimbabwe's economic situation, with
widespread, deep and deepening poverty. When women have to scrounge for food
they have little or no control on their sexuality. They cannot demand safe sex
from the legions of exploitative men. The Women and Aids Support Network, WASN,
says women are dying prematurely because ARVs are inaccessible to the majority
of people, especially women who have always been disadvantaged economically and
culturally.
WASN programme coordinator Gladys Chiwome said, “Because of
the women’s economic position and our culture, women cannot negotiate for safer
sex and because of marriage, they even suffer more - AIDS is brought into their
homes and there is nothing they can say or do to protect
themselves.
“These women feel that they cannot survive outside marriage
because they are totally dependent on their husbands and they have no say on
sexual matters.”
The foremost critic of Mugabe and his ZANU PF elite,
Pius Ncube, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, said, "Zimbabwe is not a
nation at war. It used to be able to feed itself and its neighbours. It had one
of the highest life expectancy rates, up with South Africa.
"These deaths
are largely preventable, yet without significant intervention, the situation
threatens to develop into a humanitarian crisis of biblical
proportions.”
For the likes of Abigail Murewa the choices are stark: be a
good girl and starve now; or be a bad girl, sleep around, get a little food and
but still die before the end of her 34th year.
Roselyn Godobori is the
pseudonym of an IWPR contributor in Zimbabwe.