/ 30 November 2001

South Africa should follow Uganda’s example

Comment

Shyaka Kanuma

As a foreigner, and one who’s been to a number of places, I will say you’ve got a beautiful country here, folks, and one with many prospects.

South Africa continues to get recognition as the destination of choice for the world’s indabas. And tourists continue to show much faith in the country especially after September 11.

What a surprise it is, then, to witness the unmitigated stupidity South Africa has displayed with its HIV/Aids pandemic. One look at the media reports, and not forgetting the aberration that is the South African leadership’s stance on the disease, will leave many an outsider bewildered. Consider:

Parents up in arms about sex education in schools. Their claim? Their children will become prostitutes.

The head of a hospital is suspended. The offence? He supported an organisation that helped rape survivors get anti-retroviral drugs.

A doctor in a public hospital doesn’t know what the drug nevirapine is about.

Protesters have to take the government to court to demand that it implement a national programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV/Aids.

On and on, the malarkey seems endless.

One result of the ignorance is that with a population of merely 45-million, South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV an estimated 4,5-million people are infected with the disease.

But the Medical Research Council (MRC) has more shocking news: 40% of the deaths last year of people aged between 15 and 49 the most sexually active group were due to HIV/Aids.

Based on such findings, the MRC projects that in the next 10 years the number of Aids deaths can be expected to double. By the year 2010, it says, five to seven million people will have died of Aids. That is, unless the messy organism that is South Africa makes an effort to pull its head out of the sand.

Luckily for the country, people seem to be waking up to the horrors of the pandemic and it seems they have decided to do something about it . Witness the campaign by the media, civic organisations, Aids activists and other concerned groups.

Elsewhere on the continent, we passed the phase of squabbles about whether or not the Human Immunodeficiency Virus causes Aids years ago. The debate now is how Africa’s impoverished countries can tackle an issue they see as a real threat to national and international security.

Said Uganda’s Olara Otunnu, the United Nation’s special envoy for children, earlier this year: “HIV/Aids no longer is just a worrying health issue; it has become a security issue, an existential issue for people in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Uganda recognised the problem for what it is in the mid-1980s, after Aids nearly wiped out the entire adult populations of the districts of Masaka and Rakai. A commission was set up to provide leadership to coordinate all HIV/Aids programmes, and the government quickly signed a decree stipulating that all Ugandans, beginning with the president, have an individual and collective responsibility to be actively involved in the prevention of the disease.

Sex education in schools was given priority. And despite protests by Catholic priests that sex is a sacrosanct act to be condoned only for procreation purposes, doctors advised that since the urge to mate has been known to penetrate even seminaries, the prudent thing to do is use a condom.

Civic groups like the Aids Support Organisation drummed home the fact that Aids patients are no more promiscuous or immoral than the next person. All it takes is a single act of sex, a transfusion with tainted blood or an unfortunate accident such as a nurse pricking herself with a needle.

Stigmas were done away with, people were taught that Aids patients need our love and understanding. The result? HIV-positive people in Uganda live longer, more useful lives, and perform very well in the work place.

Some Westerners might be of the view that my alleged hyper-sexuality as a black man is responsible for the high HIV-prevalence rates in parts of Africa. But no one in Uganda alluded that the Westerner alluded that they alluded … Instead, doctors scared everyone with facts about the virus and they circulated pictures of people with various opportunistic infections, emphasising the need to avoid such a fate.

The sum total of these and other efforts has been a steady decline of HIV prevalence rates in the country, from about 30% in 1992 to 8,3% in 1999.

This year Uganda has been reported as the only country in Africa where HIV/Aids infections have once again declined.

South Africans, take heed if you are not to die like lemmings.

Shyaka Kanuma is a Rwandan freelance journalist working in South Africa