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Stephen Mpofu, Perspective

EVERY cloud boasts a silver lining, one might say to paraphrase the old saying but without in any way adulterating its signification.

Today, a dark cloud hovering over Zimbabwe — add to our country other nations elsewhere in the global village — has a silver lining that should make our nation proud when its all over and back to normal.

Yes — you guessed right — this discourse is about the cloud cholera which has caused our Government to unleash flurries of activities in a bid to save lives — something that should rope in other important players, so that when it is all over with the menacing cloud having dissipated not only precious lives will have been saved but Zimbabweans and visitors to our country will not help but smile at the aftermath: the silver lining that our nation will have inherited from the cholera scourge.

Harare, our capital city as well as other parts of Zimbabwe are right now gripped by the cholera alert with the Ministry of Health and other arms of government weighing in heavily to ensure that lives are not lost for lack of requisite interventions.

Clean ups have been ordered in all urban centres to prevent the spread of the cholera menace with the Presidential Borehole Drilling Scheme across the country coming handy in providing Zimbabweans with clean drinking water — a programme that one might say was inspired by God who foresees events or disasters before their actual manifestation to humankind.

The district development fund has weighed in to ensure that every village out there in the countryside where most Zimbabweans live has a toilet for use to end open defecation as many villagers use the bush to relieve themselves so that when it rains as it is doing these days that filth is washed away to rivers and into open wells where village folk draw water for their domestic use and are therefore at risk of contaminating the disease.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Health said two days ago that quick-response health workers were on hand to attend on-the-spot to anyone feeling sick in the villages to prevent those who might be cholera- infected travelling to hospitals or other health facilities where they risked contaminating other patients there.

Add to those preventive measures the availability of medicines to combat the cholera scourge.

With Zimbabwe’s neighbour to the north, Zambia, gripped by the cholera epidemic, measures had been put in place to ensure that Zambians visiting Zimbabwe went through health checks at border crossing points with Zimbabweans travelling to Zambia being subjected to the same checks to ensure that they do not export the disease to that country.

As a precautional measure against the killer disease cholera, all parents should be urged to ensure that all water preserved for drinking should be boiled and that schoolchildren carry boiled bottled water to their institutions, instead of drinking tap water against the cholera disease outbreak.

Villagers in general should be encouraged to seek specialised medical attention when they or their offspring or other relatives become indisposed, instead of resorting to boiled tree leaves and/or roots as their traditional sources of treatment.

To put it in a nutshell, the cholera outbreak is a serious threat to our country’s economic and social development as it might derail Zimbabweans – we ourselves – as owners of the country from ensuring that we move into a brave new future without let or hinderance by disease or human obstacles.

Which therefore impels businesses or other organisations with enough capital to weigh into the fight against the cholera menace by providing monetary or human resources as a way of underpinning government efforts in the fight against the cholera scourge.

When all is said and done and the cholera menace remains immortalised in Zimbabwe’s history books, our countryside in particular will tout to the outside world postmodern homesteads with proper toilets and better health but no more Tangwenas, or eyesore thatched huts that today one finds in some if not many rural homesteads and so it will be “hurray to the silver lining in the menacing dark cloud cholera.”