HARARE – A campaign has been launched to raise £20,000 (US$25,500) to help veteran journalist Geoffrey Nyarota undergo life-saving heart surgery in India.
The 69-year-old has been told by doctors he needs to undergo coronary angioplasty, a procedure used to widen blocked or narrowed coronary arteries, the main blood vessels supplying the heart.
The procedure cannot be performed in Zimbabwe, whose health care system is creaking after years of neglect.
“I’m privileged to be the intended beneficiary of this special initiative which was launched by my colleagues in the Zimbabwean media fraternity,” Nyarota said in a video accompanying the appeal on website, GoFundMe.
He added: “I wish to thank in advance all those who are making a contribution, large or small, towards the cost of my life-saving journey to India. May the Lord bless you.”
Colleagues who launched the campaign said Nyarota “cannot afford to raise the funds required to cover the cost of the travel, and the procedure in India where he has been referred to.”
“His medical aid can only meet a small portion of the cost of this life-saving journey and specialist procedure and that by way of a refund upon his return,” they said in the appeal.
In a decorated career, Nyarota edited The Chronicle, the Financial Gazette and was the founding editor of The Daily News which was later bombed by suspected government agents and then banned by the regime of former President Robert Mugabe.
Nyarota won several international awards, particularly during his spell as a fearless editor of The Daily News which was founded in 1999, an epochal year in Zimbabwe which saw the launch of the MDC; a crash in the local currency and witnessed the beginning of farm invasions which would later lead to Zimbabwe’s international isolation and an economic collapse from which the country never recovered.
To make a contribution to the Geoffre Nyarota Support Group, CLICK HERE
