WHEN the sun goes down, nightlife takes over. The
City of Gweru is located between Harare and
Bulawayo and is ranked Zimbabwe’s number three in
terms of growth.
Despite Gweru’s nightlife is not as hot as compared to
smaller towns such as Kadoma and Chitungwiza where
a sizeable chunk of the population does not retire to
bed early.
Here by 2100 hours, the city centre will be virtually
empty, leaving only a few especially commercial sex
workers and security guards roaming the town.
The Midlands Province’s capital is dominated by few
pubs and night clubs, the leading one being Downtown
which is located on the periphery of the town’s Central
Business District (CBD).
Downtown is usually frequented by students from the
Midlands State University hence a number of “sex
predators” visit the joint for easy catch, taking
advantage of the plight of desperate female students.
Some distressed female students end up trading in sex
charging as little as $2 per round (for a few minutes) in
order to make ends meet, therefore exposing
themselves to sexual transmitted infections such as
Aids.
It is not only university students who drive Gweru’s
nightlife but also security guards and full-time
commercial sex workers.
When the WeekendPost news crew went around the
streets of Gweru on a Friday, half-naked women were
seen lining up the streets waiting for clients. It was
discovered that a number of security guards in this
town augment their meagre wages by converting
business premises into brothels, giving space for
conventional commercial sex workers whenever they
got a client — but of course for a fee.
One of the security guards (company name withheld)
fled when this publication asked him about the kind of
business he was conducting in conjunction with the
prostitutes. At the premise, the guard had prepared a
makeshift single bed which sex workers took turns to
use and it is usually for short-periods of time.
An unidentified self-confessed commercial sex worker
was bitter when asked why they were converting
business premises into brothels.
“Leave sekuru (security guard) alone, he is very kind to
us. He did not allow us to have sex inside the building
but we only use the room for storage. We left our bags
inside the room, not for sex,” she said adding that she
is not cheap to the extent of having sex on such a
ramshackle bed.
“We are not cheap as you think; we are not here for
pedestrians but rather our clients drive expensive cars
and we have sex in their cars, not on this bed, if you
want to get the truth of the matter stay here for a
while,” she said.
In September this year, the National Aids Council
Monitoring and Evaluation co-ordinator Isaac Taramuse
was quoted by local media saying the country is at
risk for new STIs infections with Harare leading the
figures followed by Masvingo Province.
Masvingo has become a source of such drug resistant
STIs.
“We have noticed some drug-resistant STIs like
syphilis, gonorrhea and discharges from around 2010
in Masvingo. These drug resistant STIs increased and
gradually spread to other places like Harare,
Mashonaland East and the Midlands. We believe that
Masvingo has become a source of these diseases for
other provinces. There is every reason to believe that
they (STIs) are coming from South Africa through
migrant and transitional labour,” said Taramuse.
The National Aids Council report indicates that last
year Zimbabwe had a total of 261 032 recorded cases
of STIs and 157 965 of the cases were women.
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