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LIVING in the low-income suburb of Mabvuku has never been for the faint-hearted.
This was graphically put to the nation years ago when it was reported a woman had died at Hunters’ Bar in the suburb while dancing to the song Amadamara by South African artiste Fred Gwala.
I have never found out what the word Amadamara means but the woman had been dancing all day to the tune on the juke box.
A friend of mine said we should go to Mabvuku and try to find the woman’s story as we thought it might make fascinating reading.
I was driving a Morris 1100 then which, because it was shaped like a hyena, we fondly called Bere; my enemies though called it the Contraption behind my back.
As it turned out we never got the woman’s story, for Bere hit a pothole, veered off the road and fell into a ditch just as we entered the suburb.
We just left it there (it had really become a contraption) and hiked back to town and bought another car.
I never went back to Mabvuku to reclaim the Contraption. As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted.
This is the reason why I am editing this publication instead of playing golf three times a week and fishing the rest of the time. This is a true story; I still have the registration book to prove it.
That was in the mid-1990s and I have never had any reason to go back to Mabvuku.
Now I hear that the citizens of this god-forsaken suburb are eating and drinking their own faeces!
This is not a laughing matter.
There has been an outbreak of typhoid in the township; so far 45 people have contracted it and six have died.
In ancient times when people just threw their waste matter out of the window, as the Romans did, it was understandable that there were occasional outbreaks of typhoid.
Not in a modern suburb or city! But then there is nothing modern about Mabvuku and come to think of it Harare — one need only see the millions of rats that have infested the metropolis once known as the Sunshine City.
There has been a serious water crisis in Mabvuku over the past 10 years.
About 200 houses built by the Kugarika Kushinga Housing Cooperative (New Mabvuku) near Circle Cement never had a drop of water since they were built over five years ago.
There are government flats in Old Tafara built in the late 1990s which are yet to be occupied because of the water woes.
The water situation has resulted in residents digging up wells in their backyards and some using water from unprotected sources.
The first reported cholera outbreak in 2008 was in Mabvuku and it claimed 10 people within a week. After the outbreak, Unicef drilled boreholes throughout Tafara and Mabvuku, but they were vandalised. Unicef intermittently brings into the suburbs water tanks for use by the residents.
Water started coming out of taps three weeks ago, mainly in Old and New Mabvuku, but residents only use it for washing. Most houses in Tafara do not have portable water.
Besides the water woes, some sewerage pipes have blocked resulting in the flow of sewage into the streets which seeps into the soil and contaminates water from wells, which largely provide water for domestic use.
This has thrown Mabvuku not only back into the Dark Ages but to pre-Roman Empire times. The Romans were renowned for their sanitation system.
Mabvuku is a microcosm of what has happened to our country. If one were to ask the powers that be what has caused this they will obviously point to the “illegal sanctions that Britain and its Western allies have imposed upon the country.”
But that is simply not true!
Social services in the country began to deteriorate well before the emergence of serious opposition politics at the turn of the millennium.
Money supposed to be used to develop the country whose population was expanding at high rate was diverted to other uses so that social services such as water and sewer reticulation systems could not be maintained and expanded.
People might be interested to know that Zimbabwe is about the only country in southern Africa which has been continually at war for 30 years.
After the 1970s war of liberation, the country was thrown into a debilitating civil war, Gukurahundi, aimed at establishing a one-party state which cost a fortune.
In the 1980s too, much money was spent in fighting the Mozambique National Resistance. Before we had forgotten that war we were plunged into the DRC civil war to prop the corrupt regime of Laurent Kabila.
The effects of that war are still being felt and nothing was gained from it. In the new millennium, the country has once again been at war with itself, with the Zanu PF government expending innumerable resources to fight democracy.
This has been a war of attrition which has seen the destruction of commercial farming which was the envy of the world. It also saw the de-industrialisation of the country and also very painfully the displacement of a huge chunk of our population that sought refuge in the Diaspora.
Only a concerted effort to restore social services round the country will restore Zimbabwe to its former glory but this requires solid political will.
BY NEVANJI MADANHIRE
Editor
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