SUSAN NJANJI, Lusaka | Sunday 7.00pm.
AFRICAN leaders on Sunday said that Aids, which has ravaged populations across the continent, is a disaster requiring an emergency response.
Vice presidents, premiers and cabinet ministers attending the 11th conference on AIDS in Africa made a commitment to increase the resources available to curb the disease, which kills more people than civil and guerrilla wars on the continent.
In a declaration read at the end of a four-hour opening ceremony at the Mulungushi conference centre in Lusaka, delegates representing heads of state and government acknowledged: “HIV/Aids is a national disaster in our countries requiring an emergency response.”
Speaker after speaker at the Aids conference urged political leaders to give serious attention to the problem that has left 11 million Africans dead since the outbreak of the epidemic in the mid-1980s.
“AIDS is really a disaster of the first order,” World Health Organisation director for Africa Ibrahim Samba, told the conference opening session.
“The time is now to declare AIDS in Africa a state of emergency, requiring emergency-type efforts,” said UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot.
“There is an urgent need for all African countries to declare Aids a national disaster,” said a coalition of Africans living with HIV/Aids, led by Lynde Francis and Moustapha Gueye.
Samba said if solutions could be found to many incidents of strife that had hit the continent before, “we should be able to invest in HIV/Aids prevention”.
The leaders committed themselves to making Aids issues a priority in all development programmes, and to providing political leadership by increasing resources made available.
They called on regional and sub-regional bodies like the southern African Development Community, COMES, ECOWAS and the Organisation of Afrucan Unity (OAU) to bridge the gap between declarations they made at their various fora and implementation of the declarations.
“The World Bank is calling on African leaders, the private sector and society at large to push the HIV/AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa to the centre of their national agendas in order to stop the fastest-growing threat to development,” the bank said in a statement released at the conference.
For five days, delegates were to brainstorm in search of practical ways to bring about a reversal of the trend of AIDS, described as the single greatest threat to economic, social and human development.
A representative of the European Union, Kirsti Lintonen, said governments and the political elite in the affected countries should bear the prime responsilibity to show political, moral and ethical leadership.
“It needs to be realised that HIV/Aids is as much a political and economic question as it is a medical problem besides being a human tragedy at a personal level,” said Lintonen.
The 21 countries with the highest HIV prevalence in the world are all in Africa, and in at least 10 of them, the rate exceeds 10% of the population.
Piot said by end of last year, more than 33 million people, a number that exceeds the entire population of Canada, were living with HIV in Africa. — AFP