As the HIV/Aids crisis in the region deepens, it is adding to the social decay in Zimbabwe
Mercedes Sayagues
Zimbabwe was billed as a peaceful country, with low crime and racial tension – far safer than South Africa. A constitutional referendum took place in February without any violence. Today, mob rule and terror reign. How did it unravel so quickly?
Zimbabwe might have appeared peaceful, but consider: at least half of adults are unemployed, three quarters of all citizens live in poverty, one out of every four adults is infected with HIV/Aids and 600E000 children have lost one or both parents to Aids.
Unemployment, poverty and HIV/Aids are an explosive combination. One that can be exploited and manipulated. Aids wreaks disaster in the rural areas. Aids- stricken lodgers in town are commonly evicted. Hospitals do not keep Aids patients for long, if at all.
Communal areas are full of terminally ill people. Without gloves and disinfectant, and ignorant of how the disease is transmitted, some of those who tend the sick become infected.
Households headed by children and grannies taking care of up to 10 orphans are frequent. “It’s so bad, you see freshly dug graves by every house,” says Florence Mbidzo, of Murehwa, 80km east of Harare.
The economic crisis has dried up remittances from urban workers. Impoverished peasants cannot afford fertiliser for exhausted soil. Aids- related illness and deaths trigger sales of assets and loss of labour. Hence, lower crop yields.
Rural youth have little hope. Many have been unemployed for years. Their self- esteem is low, their prospects bleak.
“No one cares anymore if you die today or tomorrow. People have an ‘I don’t care’ attitude,” says Prisca Mhlolo, an Aids counsellor with The Centre, an NGO for HIV- positive people.
A 1998 study on the impact of HIV/Aids on African agriculture by Professor Paul Richards of the Netherlands’ Wageningen Agricultural University, said that “increasingly, these alienated youths form their own political organisations, well beyond the boundaries of constitutional politics or democratic parties”. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, shadowy movements became rallying points for young people without jobs, decent farm income and educational prospects.
Richards notes that many under-age militia fighters in Africa’s civil wars joined because family support networks were destroyed by war. Today, Aids devastates the extended family. As the HIV/Aids crisis deepens, it increases alienation and social exclusion of rural youth.
Richards warns that youth growing up without skills, role models and community support are a pool of recruits for outlaw criminal-political militias. His analysis dwelt mostly on Uganda and Sierra Leone. As Aids decimates southern Africa, the scenario moves closer to home.
In January, for the first time, the United Nations Security Council debated a health issue – HIV/Aids – as a security threat. Its analysis is taken further in United States National Intelligence Estimate 99-17D of January 2000: “The persistent infectious disease burden is likely to aggravate and, in some cases, may even provoke economic decay, social fragmentation, and political destabilisation in the hardest-hit countries…
“The relationship between disease and political instability is indirect but real. A wide-ranging study on the causes of state instability suggests that infant mortality – a good indicator of the overall quality of life – correlates strongly with political instability, particularly in countries that already have achieved a measure of democracy. The severe social and economic impact of infectious diseases is likely to intensify the struggle for political power to control scarce state resources.”
Following national infection rates, 25% among the self-styled militias roaming rural Zimbabwe must be seropositive. Possibly more, since they are likely to have risky sex -witness the gang rapes taking place. They may or may not know they are infected. It doesn’t matter. Aids adds to the hopelessness rooted in unemployment and poverty.
“Women sell sex for as little as Z$50 [R7] for one go, Z$100 for the whole night. People get paid Z$200 a day to beat and steal,” says Mhlolo.