Why are face masks dangling below people’s chins?

Pathisa Nyathi
A RECENT visit to eMkambo, a market for miscellaneous traditional items in Makokoba (Bulawayo) revealed that stipulations and guidelines pertaining measures to curb the spread of Covid-19 are generally not being strictly adhered to. Social distancing is clearly not being observed. In addition to that, face masks are seen dangling below people’s chins. Several groups form and chat away nonchalantly.

What one surmises is that measures designed to deal with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic are involuntary rather than voluntary.
Normally, human beings will voluntarily take measures that seek to save their own lives. They need not be coerced to take measures that seek to save their own lives. Sometimes instinctive behaviour comes in to save lives through recourse to responses where humans may be slow in reacting to life-threatening situations. A finger is instinctively withdrawn from fire without thinking about it. An eye will blink and protect itself without conscious effort on the part of an individual.

However, preventive social behaviour flows from mental conviction, a process of conscious teaching-learning, education, communication and transmission of relevant knowledge. A community, through such measures, need not resort to extraneous measures to enforce mitigating procedures calculated at curbing the spread of a pandemic on the scale of the coronavirus.

We may have to draw from past communities where adherence was effortlessly implemented. Education and communication were more effective. The entire community was reached out and got convinced that it was their own lives which were at risk. Adherence was thus seen as being in their own interests. Conviction, itself a mental condition and disposition, is important for implementation of measures to curb the spread of a virus gone wild. Sometimes traditional communities gave emphasis to repercussions that awaited those who failed to comply.

Fear was internalised and used to keep individuals within paths small and straight.

In the final analysis, what mattered was that an individual’s inner conscience was reached. The critically important mind was accessed as this is what controls conscious behaviour. As already pointed out, human beings, like other animals, naturally seek to preserve their own lives.

For them continuity is of essence. Whatever educational awareness measures are being instituted must target the individual with the aim of soliciting mental conviction which is the initiator of appropriate preventive behaviour. Where community members lived in close proximity and their communities well knit, awareness information was more readily transmitted and adherence stood a better chance of success.

When face masks hang down below wearers’ chins, that is ample proof and indicator of lack of internal mental conviction. It is indisputable evidence of failure of awareness communication strategies adopted and applied within a given community. When roadblocks, manned by Zimbabwe Republic Police officers, are also manned by military police and the army even, then something is not going well. Awareness strategies have not succeeded. Normal human beings need no coercion to save their own lives. I am on record as saying in the world there is no police force more effective than a convinced mind. Crafted measures, where they are effectively communicated and explained to community members, there would be no need for policing. Each time those responsible for awareness campaigns get to a coronavirus roadblock they should engage in self-introspection. Were their awareness campaigns effective at all?

There have been reports elsewhere where draconian policing traditions still endure, where those flouting stipulated measures to curb the spread of Covid-19 were dealt with heavily. However, at the same time we need to be cognisant of the fact that our economies are run differently from those in western countries. Here the small to medium enterprises predominate. The way they operate from hand to mouth demands that the self-employed go out to acquire and sell goods and produce on a daily basis. For some of them, when that is not done, it may translate to an option between life and death. In a situation like that, they are caught in the jaws of competing causes of death. Which is better to die under lockdown, without food or venture out and contract the virus and die?

The formal employment sector does not institute cushioning measures so that when workers lose employment there are social safety nets that are designed to take care of the workers during hard times. This is true of robust economies elsewhere. Lived experiences may dictate behaviours that are displayed by human beings whose stomachs must be filled with food on a daily basis.

We watched relaxation of lockdown measures in Europe and it was clear there was higher voluntary compliance. Yes, in some isolated cases there was need to police compliance and charging those in default. In the main, we saw deserted streets. Children and parents were behind closed doors. It was not the army or police behind that, but convinced minds. Internal mental police force is the most effective force to guarantee compliance.

In our western suburbs children have never stopped frolicking outside their parents’ homes. They get together and play as if nothing is amiss.

The youths, driven by their gregarious nature, gather and dance away to blaring music. What beeps them together is absence of a convincing narrative that it is their lives that are at risk. To them, death remains remote until it knocks on their doors. Deaths taking place in the United States of America look too remote to cause fright in their minds and induce compliance. Deaths occurring in South Africa equally look remote. But the possibility of the pandemic reaching them from South Africa is there.

South Africa and Zimbabwe are intimately culturally linked, socially and most importantly, economically. The South African Diaspora has millions of Zimbabweans. Not all of them are there legally. There are some who get there through Dabulap, crossing the crocodile infested Limpopo River on foot. They cross the border at undesignated points. Such unprocessed returnees do not get the necessary quarantine to check if they are infected or not. Instead, they proceed in the same manner that they went to South Africa. They get back to their communities and melt into them.

Community members fear to report the presence of such individuals even when it is known where they are coming from and the manner of their return and, more importantly, the real possibility of spreading the virus among community members. Any member of the community who might venture to report the presence of new arrival risks inviting wrath of relatives of the returnee. The individual may be regarded as acting out of malice and jealousy. Mind you, the new arrival brings goodies from the City of Gold.

Indeed, what is emerging is that the virus has entered Zimbabwe from outside, be it overseas or over the Ramokgwebana and Limpopo rivers. Whereas all those coming through designated borders may be screened and quarantined, the reality of our situation is such that there are individuals who cross the borders at undesignated points. These pose the greatest danger in spreading the coronavirus.

In all the instances cited above, it is the educational awareness strategy that ought to hold hope for salvation. He/she who is tempted to cross the border at an undesignated point would dare not risk putting lives of fellow Zimbabweans at risk. A convinced mind becomes the border that they dare not cross. Failure or reluctance to adhere to stipulated measures itself may be averted through sound, robust and well crafted educational awareness strategies that seek to invoke, effortlessly, voluntary compliance.

Never should we rely exclusively on coercive measures. Reliance on these has never fully worked. Men always find ways to circumvent these to the detriment of the entire community. Where there is conviction, a result of a successful and effective educational awareness strategies, compliance is more or less guaranteed. Equally important in this particular thrust is the need to be particularistic in approach. More often than not convenience and laziness dictate that we import wholesale educational awareness strategies designed and developed in foreign lands to suit particular contexts.

Communities have something unique about them, from their worldview, understanding of a pandemic and how they are predisposed to leaning. These need to be taken on board so that strategies and combat techniques are characterised by critical attributes of a particular environment. At the same time, our society is very diverse. There are communities within our society that may be classified together with western societies. How these are communicated with should reflect that reality.

Where we have allowed the colonial paradigm where there is a strong divide between urban and rural areas, the educational awareness strategies should reflect that dichotomy. In rural areas the majority have no access to digital media. It we think we are communicating information about the pandemic over electronic and print media, then we are engaging in self deception. We are not communicating at all to the rural folk. The majority of them have no television sets, some have no radio sets. Many do not have smartphones and internet connectivity may be a nightmare. Certainly, newspapers are not available. Where they are available, they are beyond the reach of an average rural folk who faces economic challenges.

The better educated together with policy and strategy planners reside in urban areas and their mental eyes are clouded and tinted by urban reality. And yet when the pandemic gets to rural areas the impact will be more devastating as they are not adequately resourced to deal with the pandemic. When the so-called developed countries with a better physical infrastructure are succumbing to the pandemic, if we in so-called Third World countries get it, even the towns will not handle the situation. Mortuaries will not cope. In rural areas where they sometimes use moist sand as a form of refrigerating corpses, the situation will just be too ghastly to contemplate.