Water shortages are delaying the construction of Sengulube Clinic in Nkayi North and this is forcing villagers to travel long distances to seek medical attention, the constituency’s MP Sithembiso Nyoni said.
Construction of the clinic in ward 2 started in 2015.
The clinic is earmarked to increase easy access to health facilities after it emerged that villagers have to walk several kilometres for medical attention.
Nyoni said attempts to sink a borehole to speed up the construction of the clinic have been unsuccessful.
"But as I said, the problem is water,” Nyoni said speaking during a virtual Nkayi Community Parliament last week.
She was responding to Nkayi Community Parliament speaker Nhlanhla Moses Ncube, who had asked her to explain delays in the construction of the clinic.
“At ward 8 clinic in Ngwaladi, we got a lot of water and we piped it to go into the clinic, gardens and villages,” Nyoni said.
“Here at Sengulube, we have a problem, we have tried four times to sink a borehole and we have decided to go a distance and pipe the water to the clinic like we did in ward 8.”
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Nyoni said it was very expensive to construct a clinic on the Nkayi soils with the foundation having to be dug for more than a metre deep.
"Sengulube Clinic construction has taken too long because of the expense and the need to construct a permanent structure,” she said.
Accessing essential services such as education and health remains a pipe dream for many villagers in Nkayi.
This is despite government's policy of having a community clinic within a 10 km radius.
Zimbabwe has failed to meet the minimum 15% annual health budget allocation as indicated in the Abuja Declaration of 2001, where African leaders agreed to allocate 15% of their countries’ total annual budget to the health sector.
