Stringent economic instability impact on youths living and affected with HIV

The current economic instability notably through the rise the prices of basic commodities, transport and medicine has a regrettable and dangerous impact on young people living with HIV. Although the government through its current economic polices argues we have to suffer now to enjoy later. I believe for those living with HIV it is now a matter of acquiring AIDS and regrettably to death. The government policy that one bond is equal to the US dollar needs us to remind the government that it is a lie.

Mr Ncube should understand that, the policy has affected the accessibility and availability of fuel. The government said it had allocated US$70 million for fuel, which however did not quench the demand. The government even provided US$20 million more but the fuel situation still has not changed. This has negatively impacted he cost of acquiring health services. The transport cost have doubled and is now limited as many of the transport providers are failing to get fuel regularly. My question is Mr Ncube, Are you aware of a term called Adherence. Many will be forced to default by the situation at hand. I would want to believe the concept by BHASO called CAGS will be handy in ART collection but what will happen when there is no transport at all. The reality is that, many will not be able to go to their health centres to collect ART and forcing them to default. Defaulting slowly develop medicine resistance. We do not want HIV that is resistant to the regimen the nation can afford.

Zimbabwe seeks to have a healthy nation. This means we need to have quality food that meet good nutrition. The soaring prices of food due to factors drawing from your policy is a shoot to the investment that have been successful against HIV. Food prices are rising, yet our sources of income are dwindling. The majority of youths are vendors and have not been formally employed. You arrogantly through the guise of cholera send away vendors across the whole country even in areas where they were no cases of Cholera. Rather than increase AIDS Levy you put a funny 2% tax on our transactions. For what?

We are in a multi-currency economy, pharmacies now want US$, Rands or euro and anything else other than the bond notes. Imagine you are HIV positive and you want to take stomach ache medicine. The pharmacy is not taking bond notes.  We have limited access to US$ and we only have bonds and RTGS or Ecocash. In simple words, you are putting the lives of people living with HIV at risk of opportunistic infections which they will not be able to fight.

It is a record known that private pharmacies provide SRH services for youths compared to Council clinics, government hospitals. These places want US$, youth need, morning after pills, family planning pills. Thus we are going to have more illegal abortions, unprotected sex leading to unwanted and unplanned pregnancies and srh problems emanating from this policy.

The afore mentioned issues have been the major cause of AIDS related deaths in the 2007 to 2008 period. This was mainly due to access to ART related to the distance to the health centre, access to nutritional food was a challenge, remember the 1 - 1 - 0 or 1 - 0 - 0 eating habits adopted just to have a meal a day and the inability to deal with Opportunistic Infections as access to medicine was limited. Zimbabwe is a country with limited research capabilities in health and lives will be lost because of ignorant policies based on the acumen that we need to suffer to conquer.  Why suffer when we were never consulted. Are you suffering? You cannot make sacrifices over other people`s lives without their consent. That is purely ignorance and bad governance in practice.


Written by: Tinashe Chirape
Real Agenda For Youth Transformation
0719293194
rafytrust@gmail.com

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