Picture James Blunt in Zimbabwe Its An Outing

February 18, 2015 in Arts & Culture, Multimedia

IT was a full house at the much anticipated English songwriter and singer James Blunt’s Moon Landing Tour Concert which took place at the Harare International Conference Centre (HICC) in Harare on Tuesday evening.

Pictures: James Blunt performs in Zimbabwe

February 18, 2015 in Arts & Culture, Multimedia

IT was a full house at the much anticipated English songwriter and singer James Blunt’s Moon Landing Tour Concert which took place at the Harare International Conference Centre (HICC) in Harare on Tuesday evening.

James Blunt Harare concert a huge success

February 18, 2015 in Arts & Culture, Life and Style

IT was full house at the much-anticipated English songwriter and singer James Blunt’s Moon Landing Tour Concert which took place at the Harare International Conference Centre (HICC) in Harare on Tuesday evening.

BY TINASHE SIBANDA

Despite Blunt’s consistency in churning out hit after hit that kept audiences singing along, organisers appeared to have done their homework on security.

Dressed in a pair of jeans and T-shirt together with his band gave the audience a good run for their money with lots of interaction as he would take time to crack a few jokes leaving them in stitches in the two-hour performance.

He performed hits including Where Are You Now, Beautiful Dawn Satellites, These Are The Words and Postcards among many others that made the audience forget it was a midweek show.

Blunt took time to tell the audience that he had been very much impressed by the crowd considering that it was only his first time performing in Zimbabwe.

It was at that moment he sang the hits Bonfire Heart, Goodbye My Lover and You’re Beautiful that the audience got into an even bigger frenzy of enjoyment.

“This is my favourite guitar which I even take to my bedroom. I use it to make me feel bigger,” he said showing the audience a tiny guitar which he went on to play with ease just as the others.

He also took his time off the stage to get even closer to his audience, crowd-surfing which made it even a more memorable affair for the audience.

Blunt rose to prominence in 2004 with the release of his debut studio album Back To Bedlam, before achieving worldwide fame with the singles You’re Beautiful and Goodbye My Lover.

The album sold over 11 million copies worldwide, topping the UK album charts and peaking at number two in the United States.

Blunt’s second album, All The Lost Souls, was released in 2007, topped the charts in over 20 countries and produced the hit single 1973.

His third album, Some Kind of Trouble, was released in 2010, after its lead single Stay the Night.

A deluxe edition was then released the following year, titled Some Kind of Trouble: Revisited.

Blunt has sold over 20 million albums and 17 million singles worldwide, with his debut album, Back to Bedlam, being listed as the best-selling album of the 2000s in the UK.

Blunt has also received several awards and nominations, having won two Brit Awards, two MTV Video Music Awards, two Ivor Novello Awards as well as receiving five Grammy Award nominations.

Ebola: Namibians told to avoid Zimbabwe

THE Namibian government has warned against travel to Zimbabwe following reports that Harare had quarantined over 100 people who returned from countries affected by the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Speaking to local media from New York, the country’s health minister Richard Kamwi said he was not aware of the quarantine in Zimbabwe but warned Namibians not to visit that country.

“The incubation period for Ebola is 21 days and until they are over and the country has been declared safe, I advise Namibians not to visit and Zimbabweans not to come to Namibia,” he said.

Kamwi also maintained that no Namibian is yet allowed to visit Nigeria and Senegal.

This is despite the fact that the WHO on Monday declared that the Ebola virus had been “pretty much contained” in Nigeria and Senegal and declared the two countries Ebola-free.

“We do not know without doubt that it is contained, so we still need to take care of ourselves,” he said.

Last month the minister advised visitors from Ebola-hit countries not to visit Namibia until further notice and Namibians not to travel to such countries.

He said this advice does not affect Namibian citizens who are entitled to come back since they are guaranteed such rights in terms of the country's Constitution.

“However, such Namibians will be subjected to strict screening at the port of entry to ensure that they are not infected with Ebola,” Kamwi said.

Affected countries include Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone and now Senegal, Zimbabwe as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Ebola virus has killed more than 2,800 people since March this year.

Lockdown in Harare over Ebola scare

WILKINS Infectious Diseases Hospital was on Thursday forced to close following suspicions that one of its patients was suffering from the deadly Ebola disease.

Patients who rely on the hospital for HIV/AIDS drugs and cancer therapy were left stranded after the early morning lockdown.

Wilkins’ medical superintendent, Hilda Bara, tried in vain to pacify the restive patients but was very clear on what was happening.

“We are managing a suspected Ebola case. The decision to shut this hospital down was made in order to protect you from contracting the disease if it is proven that indeed the patient is suffering from Ebola,” she said.

“We would like to ask you to understand the situation and to seek treatment at Beatrice hospital (Nazareth). Those who want to undergo cervical cancer screening should visit their local clinics. We have also sent our nurses to Nazareth and the officials at the institution are aware of the changes so they will assist you.”

The instruction was greeted with grumbling by the patients who expressed fears they might default on their therapy.

Others said they were only left with a days or week’s supply while some had booked to see doctors at the clinic and feared they could not get the same treatment elsewhere.

With the situation increasingly looking desperate Health Minister David Parirenyatwa later told journalists at Parirenyatwa Hospital where he was visiting that there was no need to panic.

“The issue here is that of public health versus public panic. We need to curb that. Let me emphasise that there is still no Ebola in Zimbabwe and we hope there will never be,” he said. “There have been several scares and I think we need to control it by educating not only the public but also our health professionals so that they don’t get scared.

“(The patient) came to this hospital with fever, and high temperature and was vomiting and bleeding but our doctors did malaria tests and she was positive, so she has malaria. To us it’s still a scare.

“We are sending the specimens to South Africa to test the effectiveness of our system, in case we have a case. However we are still treating the case as suspected Ebola while we wait for the results. We don’t have Ebola in Zimbabwe,” Parirenyatwa said.

While Parirenyatwa claimed the suspected Harare Polytechnic student had first been admitted at Parirenyatwa hospital after visiting her home country, DRC, officials at the health institution contradicted the minister.

Acting clinical director, Noah Madziva, said: “We never transferred any patient to Wilkins. All our patients are here.”

With social media abuzz with information that the patient was a student at the Harare Polytechnic and was from the central African country, city health director, Prosper Chonzi, could neither confirm nor deny the claims.

He however, confirmed the student had been under surveillance before she fell sick.

“It is highly unlikely that it is Ebola but we have a patient who is at Wilkins, someone from DRC who went to Parirenyatwa Hospital and they thought it was Ebola after she got there with a high temperature, vomiting and some nose bleed and yesterday was her 21st day in Zimbabwe. She was in Lubumbashi which is like 3 000km away from where Ebola is.

“We did rapid malaria tests and she tested positive so we are managing it as malaria but we are using this opportunity to try out the system, in case we have the virus in Zimbabwe,” Chonzi said.

He added: “We have already collected specimen samples to be tested in South Africa. The results will tell us in four hours whether it is Ebola or not, but we have so far ruled out Ebola.

“The action is only precautionary and meant to test how efficient our systems are in terms of speed and effectiveness.”

The disease has so far claimed over 3 000 lives in West Africa and has now caused panic in Spain, the United States and Australia.

Southern Africa has only had two confirmed cases of the disease in the DRC.

According to the World Health Organisation, five people are being infected every hour and the figure could double by November.

Questions have been raised over Zimbabwe’s preparedness with intermittent claims of patients having been diagnosed with the virus. All the claims have so far proved to be hoaxes.

Zimbabwe: Water and Sanitation Crisis

Government Mismanagement, Corruption Risks Lives of Millions

NOVEMBER 19, 2013

(Harare) – The water and sanitation crisis inZimbabwe’s capital, Harare, places millions of residents at risk of waterborne disease, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Five years after cholera killed over 4,000 people and sickened 100,000 more, the conditions that allowed the epidemic to flourish persist in Harare’s hOne mother told Human Rights Watch: “We have one toilet for the whole house and there are 21 people who live here. The flushing system doesn’t work because there is no water, so we have to use buckets. When there isn’t any water for flushing we just use the bush.”

Corruption and mismanagement at the local and national levels of government exacerbate the situation, Human Rights Watch said. For example, city budget guidelines specify that most of the revenue from water must be ploughed back into the system for maintenance and improvement, but even government officials acknowledged that the money is diverted for other uses. As a result, key parts of the service delivery system, like purchasing water treatment chemicals, are not adequately funded, leading the city to produce less potable water.  

Until the late 1980s, Zimbabwe had a functioning water system, with access to potable water for 85 percent of the population. In Harare, remnants of this system are visible in a complex piped water and sewage system to which many residents are connected. The piped infrastructure has not been maintained, however. The result of deterioration of the system combined with a significant increase in the population is that the water now runs only sporadically and is often contaminated.
“Everyone has a right to access a minimum amount of potable water,” Kasambala said. “The government’s inability to maintain the water system and its practice of disconnecting those unable to pay forces people to drink water from contaminated taps or from unprotected wells.”

The government should take a number of steps to improve Harare’s water and sanitation crisis, including investing in low-cost sanitation and water strategies. These include providing community toilets and pit latrines, and drilling and maintaining boreholes so that residents do not have to rely on contaminated sources. A sliding fee scale for municipal water should be put in place to provide affordable water for low-income families, and no home should be disconnected from the city water supply for lack of payment.

Earlier in 2013, the government announced a US$144 million loan from the Chinese government, with 46 Chinese engineers coming to Harare, to upgrade the water infrastructure primarily by improving the sewage treatment plants. While the government has promoted the loan as the solution to Harare’s water crisis, its terms have not been made public. Critics have decried the loan as exemplifying the lack of transparency and corruption in water and sewage services.  

The government of Zimbabwe is obliged under international law to protect the right to water and sanitation, Human Rights Watch said. In 2010, Zimbabwe voted for a United Nations General Assembly resolution establishing the right to water and sanitation. The recognition of this right acknowledges that water and sanitation are crucial not only for health, but also for other key aspects of development, such as gender equality, education and economic growth. Zimbabwe’s constitution and domestic laws protect the right to water and, through protections concerning the environment, the right to sanitation. In May, Zimbabwe ratified a newconstitution that includes an explicit right to water.

“Harare’s water and sanitation system has been destroyed by decades of neglect and by ongoing mismanagement and corruption,” Kasambala said. “The 2008 cholera epidemic was a visible catastrophe, but less visible suffering, deaths, and indignity continue.igh-density suburbs.

The 60-page report, “Troubled Water: Burst Pipes, Contaminated Wells, and Open Defecation in Zimbabwe’s Capital,” describes how residents have little access to potable water and sanitation services, and often resort to drinking water from shallow, unprotected wells that are contaminated with sewage, and to defecating outdoors. The conditions violate their right to water, sanitation, and health. The report is based on research conducted in 2012 and 2013 in Harare, including 80 interviews with residents, mostly women, in eight high-density suburbs.

“Harare’s water and sanitation system is broken and the government isn’t fixing it,” said Tiseke Kasambala, Southern Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “In many communities there is no water for drinking or bathing, there is sewage in the streets, there is diarrhea and typhoid and the threat of another cholera epidemic.”

Many residents said that the lack of household water forced them to wait for water at boreholes for up to five hours a day, and that violence frequently erupted when lines were especially long. People believe these boreholes – 200 of which were drilled by international agencies during the cholera epidemic – are the safest water option available, yet one-third of boreholes tested in Harare by Harare Water, the city agency in charge of water, showed contamination. 

Residents also said that the city charged them for municipal water even when the water flowed only sporadically or was contaminated. If people were unable to pay their bills, the city turned off their water supply.

Some residents described raw sewage flowing into their homes and streets from burst pipes, in which children frequently played. The water shortage and the lack of functioning indoor toilets or community latrines sometimes gave them no choice but to defecate outdoors.