Illegal gold miners in Zimbabwe are also victims of the Cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of thousands in Zimbabwe, and although perchance curbing in its severity, is by no means, as Mr. Mugabe so eloquently put it, ‘arrested‘. The political risks for investment are more than clear, and reflect the lies continuing to spread through government about a disease in remission when in fact the reverse may turn out to be true.

Brian Hungwe, a Zimbabwean journalist, has provided a report documenting Zimbabwe’s broken healthcare system through charting a desperate search for gold in Zimbabwe’s northern Mashonaland province and its repercussion of a race against death as opposed to a strategy for survival.

Along the edge of rugged gold-belt terrain, row after row of tents have been erected to accommodate yet more victims of Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic. In these makeshift tents lie emaciated, dehydrated bodeis with protruding skeletons.

Continued, as excerpted from BBC’s Focus on Africa Print Edition:

Many of the victims came to Mount Darwin to find old, which hit record levels of over $1000 per ounce last year. Gold panning, which is illegal in Zimbabwe, is seen as a last chance for survival for many Zimbabweans. There are believed to be thousands of illegal gold miners in this region who move from one area to the next in search of the elusive precious metal. In sheer desperation, they dig up the belly of the earth, leaving deep gullies. But what is being described as an environmental disaster is fast becoming a human one. In these densely populated places where there is inadequate sanitation a cholera outbreak claims lives quickly.

As I write, 71 people have died in Mount Darwin alone and, according to the United Nations, 2,500 cases have been reported in just under a month. But Mount Darwin is not unique. In Chegutu, over 100km south-west of Harare, 52 people died in just two days in December.

The number of lives claimed is rising fast. In the eight months since the first outbreak was reported in urban townships, the UN states that there have been over 83, 000 infections. Georges Tadonki, head of the UN’s Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs in Zimbabwe, says that this is the only nation in the world that has recorded a country-wide cholera epidemic, a disease normally confined to a given area.

Close to $1 billion is needed to repair Zimbabwe’s broken healthcare system. Assistance is believed to be on its way, which is just as well because Zimbabwe’s government is broke. In the week he took office Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) stated there was much to do, “but there isn’t any money, even offices for government ministers“.

To make matters worse, now government ministers from the two main opposition parties have to work together and if history is the judge, petty squabbles may override more important issues. One MDC minister has also pointed out they have to deal with colleagues from Zanu-PF who have a “blame-game mindset full of conspiracy theories”. Some believe cholera was imported from Britain to affect a a regime change.

But even if Zimbabwe’s healthcare system can be revived, another worry is whether there will be anyone to staff it. Many of Zimbabwe’s nurses, specialists and doctors have left for greener pastures. 

New health minister Dr. Henry Madzorera says hospitals are “opening bit by bit but we are still at the very early staes of revitalizing the health delivery system”. The fact that young men in Harare are converting pick-up trucks in to ambulances is just one example of how far there is to go. Another is that the bodies piled up in mortuaries are often wrongly identified.

Humanitarian teams are all very well in helping to stall a crisis but there is only so much they can do. “When we deal with an emergency we treat people and leave, but when you come back months down the line the situation has gotten worse again,” admits Tadonki. ” Unless you give people clean water, and address the structural problems-which requires political will-you will go from crisis to crisis which will grow bigger and bigger”, he says.

As always those who suffer most are the poor and unemployed. Private clinics are only a solution for those with hard, (foreign) currencies and they are few and far between.

With Zimbabwe’s healthcare system on its knees, the mounting horror of its cholera epidemic cannot be understated. Its effects are being felt where Zimbabwe can least afford them-in (adaptation), people’s frantic efforts to make a living and feed their families. Despite a political settlement having been reached in the country it seems that, in this case at least, the door has been shut long after the horse has bolted.

With Zimbabwe