ABHIK KUMAR CHANDA, Abuja | Wednesday
NIGERIA may be hosting Africa’s biggest Aids conference on Thursday but its track record in combating the pandemic is pathetic, HIV sufferers say, recounting horror stories of discrimination, apathy and ignorance. Even worse, they say, is the official response to the pandemic.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is home to some 2.6 million HIV-infected people, according to official figures.
Recently, the legislature of the northern state of Kano passed a bill promoting the treatment of Aids through a bizarre healing technique involving smearing the body with ointments and honey and reading religious texts.
Former lance-corporal Mohammed Farouk, one of those remaining alive after taking a controversial government-backed treatment scheme, said the treatment did him more harm then good.
Farouk was surreptitiously tested for Aids – he was HIV positive – while his wife was pregnant in 1998. The couple had twins – one died at birth and the other seven days later.
Farouk sold his car to pay the medical fees for the alleged wonder cure costing $3 000 and was publicly applauded by the former chief of staff. However he felt the treatment was going horribly wrong and stopped it. He resigned from the army and looked elsewhere for help.
Nurse Georgina Ahamefule lost her job after testing seropositive in 1995 following medical checks during pregnancy. Ahamefule says her subsequent trauma is ”the story of HIV-positive people in my country”.
She lost her baby, and her job at a private nursing home in Lagos. She went back to her village to die but regained the will to fight after her husband arrived to persuade her to return home. She did, had a child who is perfectly healthy and formed the Nigerian Aids Alliance (NAA), a pressure group with 300 volunteers.
Emaciated, with bloodshot eyes, Ahamefule’s legal fight against her employer over her dismissal took a nasty turn last year when a Lagos magistrate forbade her from entering the courtroom, ”because she said I would give her Aids”.
Former soldier Farooq, an NAA member, said he took revenge on the magistrate in his case. ”I went to her house, spoke to her, shook her hand and then said ‘You have shaken hands with a HIV-positive man. She screamed, she shouted… and today she is living with that incident.”
Yinka Jegede, also a nurse, said she had witnessed a gruesome incident in the western state of Osun.
”A 35-year-old man was found to have Aids. The doctors in my hospital threw him out and advised his mother to burn all the things in their house as she could get infected from his possessions.
”The mother was forced to take him to the bush (jungle). We went there after four days and he was going to die any moment. Some friends took him in and although it has been three years, the man is still alive,” she said. – AFP
ZA*NOW:
African health: how not to go about it April 23, 2001