Zvamaida Murwira Harare Bureau
LAW MAKERS yesterday demanded to know why Mashonaland East province, the home of Health and Child Care Minister David Parirenyatwa, had the highest concentration of village health workers compared to other provinces.
This came out during a portfolio committee meeting on health and child care where the Secretary for the Ministry Gerald Gwinji was giving evidence. It emerged that Mashonaland East province had more than 2,200 village health workers while some provinces had as little as 120.
Gwinji was taken to task to explain such a huge disparity.
Ruth Labode (MDC-T), was the first to raise the issue. Binga North MP Prince Sibanda (MDC-T) echoed similar concerns.
“How does Mashonaland East have more than double village health workers? How did you get to that figure? We want to know factual reasons. Otherwise the next question (we’ll ask) is who comes from that area? Is it Gwinji or Minister Parenyatwa? Our concern is on the distribution of resources. There’s an unexplained pattern of skewed distribution of resources. The permanent secretary must be able to explain why we have such disparities,” said Sibanda.
Committee chairperson and Gutu South MP, Paul Chimedza (Zanu-PF), directed Gwinji to give a specific response after the permanent secretary appeared to give a generalised one.
Gwinji said they had trained more than 1,200 village health workers that were still to be deployed to cover up for shortfalls in other areas.
“Yes, there is an apparent disparity on this. We’ll look at our database and give you a response,” said Gwinji.
After a protracted discussion with MPs taking turns to lambast Gwinji, Chimedza told the permanent secretary that the committee was not convinced by his explanation.
“The committee isn’t satisfied with the explanation. It’s not happy with that explanation. We’ll ask you to go to your database on this particular issue and explain to us in writing,” said Chimedza.
Earlier on, Gwinji told a portfolio committee on Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development chaired by Goromonzi West Cde Beata Nyamupinga (Zanu-PF) that they would keep monitoring the impact of a book to be published by Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede and his colleague Richard Hondo, which highlighted the effects of contraceptives on women.
In his book, Mudede seeks to discourage women from using contraceptives saying they caused some cancers among other effects.
“In general this is a free country. If we feel that it has an impact on public health we’ll move in. It’s a commercial enterprise and we can’t stop it. It’s his feelings, we’ll continue to monitor. We’re not there to counteract his book word for word,” said Gwinji.