Zimbabwe: Anti-Cholera Rules Beneficial to Many

21 MARCH 2024

The Herald (Harare)

The new measures adopted by Cabinet this week to reduce risk of cholera transmission and infection will have many other benefits besides the primary one of pushing back on what appears to be a remarkably sticky cholera outbreak.

The ban on occupation of new housing before services such as sewerage are connected will ensure that all future new housing has guaranteed sanitary safety before anyone moves in.

At the same time, it will help provide an additional legal tool to ensure that proper town planning procedures are carried out, something some councils, and especially Harare City Council, were very slack in doing during the era of the land barons. When something is needed for public health, and connection to the sewers and a water supply are obvious requirements for public health in urban areas, additional legal demands fall on both central and local government.

It needs to be noted that the Cabinet is talking about future housing, not the housing that already exists that was occupied in the land-baron era before the services were connected. But most house owners in this group have already installed septic tanks or other approved sanitation, so they are fairly safe, although considering the sort of test results of borehole water quality in Harare, they should treat or boil their water before drinking it.

For this group a more permanent solution is coming through, with the central Government pushing the title deed programme forward and now coming close to the day when large scale issuing of deeds will be in progress.

That will mean that shortly, most of these householders will have their title deeds, and can then move to the next stage, using those individual title deeds to back the financing. Many will need to join in the community development of their new suburb, putting in the services the land barons left out, such as the roads, water supply and sewers. This will give them the public health safety that is of the approved high order.

We feel that some way of allowing communities to enforce payment for the needed services, either in cash if they have it or through some sort of mortgage, will be required. There will be need for Government approval of the works and their costing.

We imagine that the minimum required but at the approved standard is what can be enforced, and any fancier work would have to be more voluntary.

But the Government, for other reasons as well, is correct in preventing future housing disorder that has to be sorted out and the creation of public health risks during the sorting out. We need to follow the trusted methods laid down for more than a century of urban housing, after some initial disasters early last century, that we know work and will work for the life of the new housing, several centuries in all probability.

The other area where the Cabinet has taken action is in mining. Major mines already have to have housing of laid-down minimum standards, which also include sanitation, and in any case there cannot be a mine manager of a major mine who wants to risk disease outbreaks and possible quarantining of the mine and its housing.

The way these mining companies coped with Covid-19 and followed the expert advice must give the Government a lot of confidence that they will not become epicentres of cholera outbreaks.

Small mines are far more variable. Some are well organised, and even some that are simply collections of artisanal miners who happen to co-operate well and follow advice and procedures are more than acceptable.

So once again we get a useful secondary gain from fixing the public health and reducing the risk of cholera. We turn makeshift communities of over-individualistic artisanal miners into at least minimum level bodies that will work together on the essentials, and that will help with more than just sanitation.

A general adherence to safety rules is obviously needed, and as the community is created the licensing of groups of artisanal miners becomes possible and necessary.

The Mazowe Valley must be the generator of nightmares for public health experts, with one of the very few perennial rivers running through gold rich territory and many of the artisanal operations on the river bank. A single cholera infection could spread to scores of communities within a few days. So the ban on artisanal mining in this highest risk area seems a rational move.

But again, we can generate a lot of successful secondary benefits. Presumably measures can be taken by artisanal miners co-operatively to meet the public health needs, and thus other requirements of mining law. So this ban could be the start of a proper organisation of micro gold mining down the valley, done according to law, safety rules and the required sanitation and health requirements.

A lot has been done to contain the present cholera outbreak, but with several hundred new cases a week, we are obviously just containing it, not eliminating it. The Government is stepping up efforts, including obtaining more of the limited global supplies of cholera vaccines, but the ultimate solution is to have proper sanitation, everywhere, and all drinking water, everywhere, being safe.

The latest series of measures are simply part of that permanent solution, or at least not making what we have worse. The Government is not banning permanent housing development or the smallest scale of mining, but is insisting that the standards already laid down in town planning, public health and mining legislation are enforced and followed as we work on reducing risk and, as a major additional benefit, getting a better economy and country.