No Holiday from Suffering for Zimbabweans
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While Oxfam warns that 1 million Zimbabwean citizens are at risk from a cholera outbreak, who is taking care of Zimbabweans while Mugabe is on a month-long holiday and the world squabbles over how best to deal with the crisis in Zimbabwe?
While the US and EU try to use the rod of sanctions to oust Mugabe, the Zimbabwean economy is dismantling apace. The Zimbabwean dollar is practically valueless and its healthcare in total crisis. Ordinary Zimbabweans needing food and medical supplies are in effect being strangled by the political impasse.
In steps President Hugo Chavez offering his support to Robert Mugabe and food, water and medical aid to the Zimbabwean people. “Venezuela is sending a group of rescue workers with 74 tons of humanitarian aid.. ” said Justice Minister Tarek El Aissami at the beginning of 2009. China, long-time supporters of Mugabe have donated $500,000 in aid.
While political points are made and lost in Zimbabwe though, it is the aid agencies who are being worked to the bone in an attempt to alleviate the suffering of the Zimbabwean people. And they rely on the support of donors to make their work possible.
Direct Relief International is one such agency. Since November 2008 they have donated and delivered $1.3 million worth of medicines and supplies to Zimbabwean hospitals. They have been instrumental in ‘delivering’ over $37 million worth of medical products donated by the medical giant GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) – $2.2 million dollars worth of specifically requested antibiotics donated by GSK in the last month to support the Harare Central Hospital.
UNICEF spokeswoman Tsitsi Singizi said, “We have been providing 360,000 litres of safe water every day, now we have managed to procure enough water-treatment chemicals to take care of the entire country’s need and have started distributing it.”
Of course aid agencies have to function in the same conditions under which the country languishes, so no quick fixes are likely, and sometimes Mugabe himself has stood in the way of aid workers accessing his people and providing for their needs.
On the 18 December 2008 the Zimbabwe Health Cluster, made up of Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health, non-governmental organisations such as World Vision, Médicins Sans Frontières, and UN agencies announced a co-ordinated plan to respond to the humanitarian crisis in that country.
A spokesman, Georges Tadonki, said that lack of confidence on the part of donors was making their job far more difficult, as well as “an urgent need to resolve the political crisis”.
