Happy New Year, dear reader. I guess it is not too late to wish you the best of luck in 2018. May you have enough money to get your bundles in this year (because we will not be copying and pasting articles to people who do not have internet bundles for reading).
The first Friday of the year has us kick-starting the year with something serious. Let’s get to it.
On the first day of December, 2017 I shared an article from the Venomous Hope. The article was shared some time around 1900 hours and I must have gave some funny accompanying statement to the link. I probably said that I was reporting live from my work place. I happened to be sharing the link from Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital where I was running up and down the Delivery Suite (Labor Ward) in the Gogo Chatinkha Maternity Wing.
There is some interesting history surrounding the events that led to the construction of the maternity wing by the Father and Founder of the nation, Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Kamunkhwala Banda. It is said that the then President sanctioned the building of the unit after he had seen women lying on the floor in the maternity unit on his tour of the Queen’s hospital. This was a very unusual thing because in those days people used to try to perfect everything to give a good impression to the Life President but Dr John CHiphangwi, the Gynecologist who was in charge of the unit then defied the advice that was given by his fellows to “hide” the patients that were on the “floor beds” to create the impression that they had enough bed space and the conditions were good. He opted to leave things as they were to give the true image to the Ngwazi and clearly that paid off. Today the unit boasts of a Labour Ward with its own operating theatre for Obstetric and Gynecological procedures along with an antenatal and postnatal ward. In other words, we have a unit where our mothers can check in whenever they have problems in pregnancy, when they want to deliver and after delivery. I happen to have started work in the unit on the first of December in 2017 and the month or so that I have been there have shown me that there is a need for another Ngwazi to come and do a walk-about.
I could share a lot of technical details when it comes to the politics of who gets to Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital’s maternity wing. That, on the other hand, would be grossly unnecessary. One thing that I need to share, however is that it is a busy place with a high turn-over because Blantyre has no District Hospital or any other referral center for advanced reproductive health care and other forms of health care. This entails that every referral from both rural and urban Blantyre ends up in the GCMW and years after Kamuzu solved his Mbumba’s problems, we have gotten back to the same problem of having people on the floor in the maternity unit of what is considered to be the biggest hospital in the country. Sad, right?
I like to think of what has happened here as some sort of vicious cycle that we all ought to have on our minds. We have a maternity unit that is out there fueling our procreation and our increasing numbers are overwhelming the very thing that is there to help safe procreation. In the end, what we have is a situation in which people are receiving sub-optimal care because there is so much pressure on the resources that we currently have.
I am not in the habit of pulling research papers and epidemiological statistics for my articles and I can not tell you about the average fertility for a Malawian woman. Those are not details that I have on my fingertips but what I know is that we are seeing a very huge child bearing window in the country as we have people from the age of 13 years to as old as 42 (someone told me that he saw a 53 year old with a pregnancy related problem) showing up in the delivery suite. It is also an undisputed fact that there are a lot of women showing up for post-abortion care in the same unit.
Away from the hospital, there has been some sort of sudden improvement in the power supply by our electricity companies.
For a good half of last year, however, we experienced a lot of power outages and at some point our leader came to the podium and pointed out that the problems came about because there haven’t been much of efforts to expand our power generation. What that tells me is that there probably was a time when the power generated by our station was enough for the people who could afford it. We could possibly say the same about some other resources like land, housing and transportation network which are now succumbing to the pressure of the exponential increase in our population.
Looking at the projections and the trends in the population, I cannot help to wonder as to what the situation will be like when some of us wake up someday and decide to have six children. We should be worried not only about what we are going to feed and clothe them but rather whether the country will have enough to sustain their livelihoods and the livelihoods of their offspring.
I have a feeling that I am addressing the wrong audience. A lot of you are probably the sort of people who will get confident that they have what it takes to bear and raise a child whenever they have an account that has a stable seven figure amount. Not unlike me, perhaps. The reason I am telling you this, however, is that I believe that we all have a role and the capacity to bring down this accelerated and uncontrolled growth of population before it brings the nation to its knees. We need to realize that while we have a number of fingers pointing to the government for the poor living conditions, some more fingers should be pointing to us for multiplying beyond our sustenance capacity.
I am not sure of how you will do it, but I do hope that this reflection will help you think of at least one way in which you can influence people in your circle in a bit to slow the population surge. Bakili Muluzi once told us to slow down, and I am here echoing the very same message. Sitikuti musakhale ndi ana, but we need to think about their future before we bring them into this world… and probably help others do the same.
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