Malawi’s President Bakili Muluzi on Tuesday said his own brother Dickson died of Aids three years ago, as he launched the country’s first and long-awaited policy on fighting Aids.
”My own brother, third born in our family, died of Aids three years ago,” said Muluzi, who is a strong advocate in the battle against the pandemic, which infects 14,4% of the country’s 11-million people.
He added: ”I have no apologies to making this publicly known to Malawians. We should be open and break the silence about HIV/Aids.”
He said his family had agreed to make known his brother Dickson’s cause of death in order to help ”change attitudes, break the silence and initiate open talk about sex and Aids”.
Muluzi added that with 350 new infections daily in the impoverished Southern African country there was ”no alternative but to openly discuss the serious problem that we have, so that we are able to teach people about the dangers of the disease”.
”Why hide?” he asked, adding that he has never heard Malawians openly declare at funerals that their relatives had died of HIV/Aids-related diseases.
”The fight against the killer disease could only succeed if we break [the] barriers of silence, stigma and discrimination.”
Muluzi, who retires in May after his second five-year-term expires, implored Malawians to go for HIV tests, saying he himself had undergone one.
For inquisitive Malawians who wanted to know his HIV status, Muluzi added: ”The good news is that it is good news.”
”How many of us know of our HIV status?”, he asked, bemoaning the fact that only 3% of Malawi’s 11-million-strong population have gone for voluntary tests.
”What are we afraid of?” Muluzi asked, adding that even young people need to know about their status before marriage.
He said the ”home-grown” policy will offer the legal and administrative framework for monitoring and intervening of HIV/Aids programmes, largely funded by donors including the European Union, the United Nations Development Programme, the United States, Britain, Canada and the World Bank.
Biswick Mwale, who heads Malawi’s National Aids Commission, said the policy would also put forward about $3-million to help subsidise anti-retroviral treatment. — Sapa-AFP