From Andrew Fleming to Parirenyatwa Hospital

Mirror Reporter

A few weeks ago, President Thabo Mbeki was answering questions on Zimbabwe in the South African parliament. In what will have startled his listeners as amazing background knowledge on Zimbabwe, President Mbeki gave as an illustration of the problem of transition the case of Andrew Fleming Hospital, now Parirenyatwa Hospital.

Designed and constructed at a time when settler colonization was viewed as a permanent and everlasting feature, Andrew Fleming Hospital was a “Whites Only” facility that accounted for 50 per cent of the country’s annual health budget. Spacious and elegant, it looked then less a hospital than a five-star hotel, with the best of both staff and technology.

Come independence in 1980, the new Minister of Health – no less than the heady Herbert Ushewokunze – moved quicker than most of his counterparts in the new Zimbabwe. Andrew Fleming Hospital was renamed Parirenyatwa, after Zimbabwe’s first indigenous medical practitioner, Samuel Parirenyatwa, the late father of the current Deputy Minister of Health, David Parirenyatwa. This marked the beginnings of the democratization process in health (but, also in education) as facilities were “de-racialized” across the country and as Parirenyatwa became as much a “general hospital” as Harare Central Hospital.

As President Mbeki explained to his listeners, the old structures and facilities designed for a minority could no longer cope under the weight of the majority. The infrastructure itself began to degenerate quickly and likewise the capacity to deliver good service and efficient health care. This became the pattern of degeneration across the country as previously “Whites Only” hospitals, schools and other social amenities were democratized. The racists themselves called this the “break-down” of services associated with black majority rule; and even today many a member of the black middle class waxes nostalgia about the good colonial days, even though blacks in general were largely outside the sphere of such privileged facilities.

True, any meaningful process of democratization is bound to be costly and must mean, at least in the initial phase of the transition, a drastic drop in standards hitherto enjoyed only by a minority. The question is how long such a transition should be and what ought to be the programme of development in the context of which improvements should be made throughout post-independence society.

Well, most people in Zimbabwe would be justified in concluding that it has taken far too long to see any meaningful improvement in the basic health and educational facilities, notwithstanding that such a sentiment has to be tempered with the acknowledgement that our declining economic fortunes makes it increasingly difficult for government to sustain the programme of social development with the same level of intensity as it did during the 1980s.

Let’s go back to the Parirenyatwa example. I had to assist a family friend last weekend in retrieving from the Parirenyatwa mortuary the body of a loved one. What a disaster! Anybody who has stood even 10 metres away from the mortuary will know what I mean. But imagine, if you will, the physical conditions within a facility hitherto meant for the privileged minority in colonial times but which now has to cater for a far greater population factor.

Have we lost all notions about forward planning? And how many times has the media and other sections of society – including the medical practitioners themselves – complained about the deteriorating conditions at Parirenyatwa, particularly the mortuary? Do we all have to wait for our dear ones to depart before we discover such atrocious conditions, and then, perhaps, all of us clamour for the appropriate extension and installation of new equipment at the mortuary? You would have thought the disaster would end at the mortuary, until you begin the hard search for a grave at one of the cemeteries. Cemeteries? Yes, cemeteries, but even in 2001 the concept is still alien to most of us Africans. Indeed, there was until two decades ago or so the practice of burying beloved ones “at home”, at the family shrine, on the side of that huge musasa tree. Even today, I must confess, it does look ridiculous to confine our dead in this limited places available in such enclosures as we call cemeteries, with our dead almost virtually shoulder to shoulder in endless rows, each grave numbered as if we had buried a mere number.

But, again, Warren Hills Cemetery, like Pioneer Cemetery before it, were only two decades ago or so a “Whites Only” preserve. And, again, no one seems to have foreseen that the democratization process – that would necessarily include mortuaries as well as cemeteries – would leave Warren Hills Cemetery bursting at the seams. The City of Harare appears helpless, no idea about forward planning, let alone imagination in a city with so much land at its disposal.

And, of course, Warren Hills Cemetery today is a far cry from the beautiful “Garden of Rest” that it was when confined to the minority. The City of Harare has failed totally to maintain the cemetery which, during the rainy season in particular, is so overgrown that it is often difficult to find the grave of your loved one.

Equally disastrous are the hills overlooking the cemetery: the level of environmental degradation thereon is so frightening that if the City officials continue to look on this so indifferently, as they are already, the hills will be bereft of any trees, at the mercy of wood-cutters from the residential areas close to the cemetery.

From News24 (SA), 28 July

Mugabe appoints his judges

Harare - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has appointed three new judges seen as stalwarts of the ruling party to the Supreme Court, reports said on Friday. Some slam the move as an attempt to influence the judiciary. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said that the additional judges were needed to handle litigation by white farmers "who are contesting and indeed frustrating the government's land reform programme", in a statement quoted by the state-run Herald newspaper.

White farmers, through the Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU), have already won a Supreme Court ruling declaring the violence-wracked land reforms unconstitutional, and individual farmers continue to press claims to retain their farms. Chinamasa did not say when the new judges - Misheck Cheda, Vernanda Ziyambi and Luke Malaba - would take the bench. Under Zimbabwean law, Mugabe has unrestricted powers to appoint judges or to expand the size of the bench. His appointments are reviewed only by the Judicial Services Commission, which is also filled with Mugabe appointees.

"The real reason for the new appointments is an attempt to further Zanu-ise the judiciary in this country," said Tendai Biti, a leading constitutional lawyer and an MP from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). He was referring to Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party. "Fortunately the men and women who have been appointed are men and women of integrity," Biti said. "The intended subordination of the Supreme Court through the appointment of judges who are perceived as sympathetic to the Mugabe regime is not going to succeed."

International legal groups have criticised the government for making threats against judges and their families earlier this year. Former chief justice Anthony Gubbay went into early retirement after Chinamasa reportedly told him the government could no longer guarantee his safety. He was replaced with a judge widely seen as pro-government. Gubbay and other judges came under heightened pressure after the government suffered a series of defeats at the Supreme Court, including rulings which ended the government monopoly on broadcasting, invalidated its land reform scheme, and allowed the opposition to bring legal challenges to its electoral losses.

Mugabe's government has pushed through new legislation to counter some of those rulings and ignored others. The court's new composition casts doubt on how any future legal challenges would be decided. The MDC has won four of its 37 electoral petitions and lost four others. Both sides have appealed their losses to the Supreme Court. Would-be private broadcasters have also vowed to challenge a new broadcasting law before the court, saying the law sidestepped last year's Supreme Court decision on the airwaves by imposing too many restrictions on broadcasters. The court is also due to return to its ruling on land reforms. It had ordered the police to evict thousands of occupiers from white-owned farms and told the government to craft a legal land reform programme by July 1. The deadline has passed without any apparent action.