By Nyasha Mutena.
Harare, Zimbabwe (News of The South) – Government has been urged to engage the civil society on the development of a submission paper on priority funding areas in the 2020 national Budget to achieve satisfactory results in its quest to achieving universal health coverage.
Speaking at a meeting organized by SAFAIDS, Country Coordinator of The Pan African Positive Women Coalition in Zimbabwe and former model Tendayi Westerhoff said it was critical for government to honor its commitment to the Abuja declaration (2001) where African leaders agreed to allocate 15% of their health budget towards procurement of HIV, TB and other related infectious diseases medications.
Westerhoff said these factors should not only be viewed as a catastrophe to health but a huge threat to development itself so as to ultimately set targets for health financing.
“There has to be a way to hold our government accountable for the promises they made at the Abuja declaration, HIV/AIDS/TB and other related infectious, these diseases should not be recognized only as a crisis to health but also as developmental threats,” said Westerhoff.
She bemoaned the rate at which substance use has seized the youth saying there should be a way to help them without necessarily criminalizing the victims.
“I watched with despair the news of a man who succumbed to ‘musombodia’ overdose, we have a situation of losing more lives if we do not devise ways and means to deal with these issues.
“This is the same mistake we made in the late 80s and 90s when HIV/AIDS was first discovered and we lost a lot of lives because of ignorance, no matter what the circumstances, if it effects in loss of life we need to deal with it,” said Westerhoff.
Zimbabwe Civil Liberties Drug Network Projects Executive, Mr Wilson Box concurred with this.
“Our primary challenge is emanating from our legal and policy framework when we criminalize drug users instead of finding ways to assist them.
“They should be an allocation on the health disbursement to facilitate medications which eradicate drugs and the cravings in their health system like methadone and naloxone so that when they fall sick, they do revert to their ways desperately,” said Mr Box.
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