MSU: Senga's blessing and curse

With a more than 23,000 strong student population, the Midlands State University has been a blessing and a curse to Senga Township, one of the oldest suburbs in Gweru.The student body provides the suburb with a ready market for a variety of goods and services.

The failure by the university to accommodate all students in its hostels has given rise to a booming room rental business in Senga and neighbouring suburb of Nehosho as homeowners take in desperate students.

Homeowners in Senga, the majority of whom are impoverished pensioners, see the MSU as the proverbial cash cow providing them with a regular source of income in the twilight of their years.

Accommodation is rented per head and the more students one takes in, the more money they get.

Insatiable demand for student accommodation has resulted in people paying up to $80 per head per month with as many students as possible squashed in one room.

Those with money have built hostel-type houses solely to cater for student accommodation where up to 25 students are cramped in one house. The huge student population has spawned a thriving home food industry.

Cooking and selling of isitshwala is now a lucrative business among the previously unemployed housewives as most students want to avoid the hustle of cooking after lectures.

The steady flow of cash from MSU students has allowed most property owners to meet their obligations such as payment of council bills.

"MSU has brought money to Senga. Most of the residents depend on the university. During vacations, you can actually feel the impact of the university's closure.

"We have a lot of mushrooming tuckshops but during vacation, business is low," said Garcia Chimatira, who mans a public information centre in the suburb.

"During vacation breaks, residents struggle to meet some of their financial obligations when students are away,"he said.

The Gweru City Council has joined in the bandwagon to cash in on the university and designated Senga a commercial zone. While residents in other high density suburbs such as Mkoba, Mambo and Ascot pay an average of $20 a month for water and rates, in Senga the charges are now pegged at $80 as the local authority argues that taking in students in return for rent constitutes a commercial enterprise.

But concentration of a large number of mostly young people in Senga with no parental guidance has resulted in vice. The university's female students have gained notoriety for allegedly soliciting for sex in return for monetary rewards. There is a widely held perception that students at MSU, more than any other institutions of higher education in the country, engage in prostitution.

A recent report by the National Aids Council disputed by university authorities attributed a three percent rise in HIV cases in the Midlands to promiscuity by students at the university. NAC said students at the university were engaging in sex with older people such as sugar mummies and sugar daddies.

A doorman at a night club in Gweru said female students were frequent visitors to the club where they competed for clients with commercial sex workers.

However, he said MSU students were not as brazen as street commercial workers. While sex workers did not think twice about engaging as many sex partners a night as possible, known as short time, at a lodge across the road from the nightclub at $5 a session, MSU students preferred longer term transactional relationships, said the doorman, who wanted to be identified as Diva.

When this reporter visited the nightclub, there were no students as they were writing end of semester examinations. Chimatira said prostitution was rife among female students. But he was quick to lay some of the blame for the problem on parents.

Some parents send their children to the university without adequate provisions, resulting in girls being forced to sell their bodies in order to survive.

"Parents are not giving their children enough money, forcing children into prostitution. They are sending their children to university when they can't afford it.

You give a child $20 pocket money for the whole semester yet she stays with people who bring Chicken Inn (take away food) every day. What do you expect her to do?"

He said at one time the local community came up with a database of students in the suburb and any wayward behaviour was reported to the MSU authorities. This, Chimatira said, helped maintain discipline among students resident in Senga.

Senga councillor Moses Marecha said the MSU had brought both good and bad to the area.

"MSU has been both a blessing and a curse. It has brought development in the form of new residential suburbs," he said.

But the downside was female students going out with older men which he put down to economic challenges facing the country. However, Marecha feels the biggest curse the university had brought on Senga was council's decision to charge its residents commercial rates.

Residents were being punished for their entrepreneurial skills by taking in students, he said.

Marecha said it was unfair to charge commercial rates in Senga considering that during vacation breaks, residents did not take in students. Also, council by-laws did not place a limit on the number of people who can stay in a single dwelling.

"I have not seen anywhere in the by-laws where there is a limit in the number of occupants. If I stay with 10 people in my house, it's not an offence."

Gogo Regina Dzombo said the university had brought a new fashion sense which she as an elderly person did not understand.

"The girls are walking almost naked. One day, I asked a girl who was wearing a very short skirt to kneel and she failed." Gogo Dzombo said her heart bleeds each time she sees cars driven by older man parked outside Batanai Hostel which houses the university's female students.

Chimatira said the MSU's recruitment policy was to blame for the emerging social problem in Senga. He said the university's gender policy of encouraging the girl child to apply could be inadvertently promoting prostitution.

He feels that unlike long established institutions such as the University of Zimbabwe and the National University of Science and Technology, the MSU was taking in far too many students per intake.

"Their recruitment is lax and taking in too many people and Senga is a small place for such a huge population," he said.

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