HARARE City Council’s health services director, Prosper Chonzi, yesterday warned church leaders against organising large religious gatherings in the city without the consent of the local authority, saying large crowds posed a serious health hazard due to limited ablution and sanitation facilities.
Phyllis Mbanje STAFF REPORTER
Chonzi’s remarks came following reports of last week’s bumper 350 000 crowd that attended the Walter Magaya-led Prophetic, Healing, Deliverance ministers (PHD)’s all-night prayer meeting at an open space in Waterfalls.
“Church leaders must consult us first before holding such meetings so that we assess the facilities and also how the food is prepared,” Chonzi said.
He said his department had dispatched health inspectors to check on the church’s ablution facilities and find out if they were adequate for such a large crowd.
“I am still to get the report on their findings, but what we are saying is that the respective church leaders should work together with us in ensuring that the members of the public are safe,” he said.
Before the event even started food vendors had lined up outside the church building selling their wares to people who had come to attend the event.
Many did not have appropriate utensils for storing their food and resorted to the use of suspicious looking buckets while some were dishing it out from pots. It was not clear where the food had been prepared and they continued selling it well into the night and early hours of Saturday.
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Around 3am in the morning many people could still be seen milling around the vendors buying food which was continuously being reheated to give an illusion of it being freshly cooked.
Even inside the church building various caterers were selling food and loads of green vegetables were carelessly piled all over with huge flies swarming all over them.
Another church which hosts huge gatherings without proper facilities is the Nehemiah Mutendi-led Zion Christian Church (ZCC).
Every year in August the church holds its pilgrimage at Defe Dopota in Gokwe with church members relieving themselves in the bush, raising fears of a major disease outbreak.
Diseases like typhoid and dysentery thrive in conditions with poor hygiene and inadequate supply of clean water.
The mode of transmission is the faecal-oral route, through ingestion of bacteria in food or water contaminated with faeces or urine of infected persons.
