Silent Frontline Workers In The Fight Against The Novel Coronavirus

Own Correspondent

Women have for long been care givers because the society has viewed them only as nurtures.

In this Covid-19 era, many victims of flu has survived owing to the timely intervention of the womankind.

This Post On Sunday writer is one of the people who barely survived an acute coughing, diarrhea and general body weakness and unwillingness to eat phenomena at the beginning of the year with the help of a woman who gave birth to his children.

She worked very hard to seek help from the best herbalists who identified ‘mushani’ as a remedy of all seasons. This ‘mushani’ has been used by our mothers from time immemorial to cure fever, malaria and other ailments by boiling it and then making us steam in it while covering our face with a cloth the process for would be blazing hot inside the steam until all sweat comes out.
Now we are told this is ‘Zumbani’ by another ethnic name. Our mothers would exhort us to bath using the ‘mushani’ boiled water and even make tea from the powder which resembles ‘tea leaves.’

These are the silent frontline workers in the fight against the novel coronavirus whose unstinting love for humankind has made this world a beautiful place to be.

It is not just the day when women achievement is celebrated that men should think about the fair sex but every day of one’s life should be spent doing good things to the women who nurtured them notwithstanding the gender based violence that their men inflicts on them.

In the closing stages of 2020 and this year, media headlines talking about men violently killing their wives or girls have dominated the media.

One man is said to have been incensed by the wife’s utterance to the effect that he was not the father of their three children. In a fit of rage, the man axed to death his wife and the three children before attempting to kill himself in vain.

This is the way of life that some women have resigned themselves to in some homes where the man of the house is a Hitler whose word is law although he may have flawed reasoning at times.

Crimes of passion are not restricted to the male gender alone. Cases have been recorded where in a fit of rage women have killed their children as a way at getting back at the husband for assumed misdemeanors.

In one incident, a woman killed her three girl children in the wake of the husband’s demands for a male heir and he apparently justified his wayward promiscuity to be a search for a boy. Isn’t this rank madness?

The International Women’s Day makes the world pause and reflect on all the positives that women do which go untold while the man folk bask in glory. This old adage ‘behind every successful man is a woman’ holds true today as it has done over the years.

Some of Africa’s greatest leaders are women although patriarchy was a dominant ideology. Queen Nzinga of Angola and Queen Cleopatra of Egypt come to mind. Closer home, Nyamhita Nehanda grew in stature to co-rule with her brother, Nebedza Matope, the second Mutapa.

Closer home, in the new dispensation, we have seen how female Provincial Ministers have spread the message of development from the woman’s perspective as she knows the part of the shoe where it pinches for she is the wearer of the shoe.

Mai Ze Dong, the legendary Chinese leader, said, ‘women hold half the sky’ and any economic, social and political development can be a success if the other half of mankind is not left behind.
When women are integrated into the mainstream economy, there is every hope that household economic development would be the result.

Every year, the world stop for a moment to think about the contribution that women hand out to mankind and celebrate that. It should not be only on that day that we celebrate womanhood but every day can be set aside in our hearts for that.

It is now time to kick out gender based violence and make it part of our history and not to be the contemporary issue like it is doing today.