A rchive Date
[ 21-07-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Africa ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/worthington.html
Time for Africa to act responsibly
By PETER WORTHINGTON - Toronto Sun
July 21, 2002 A recent National Post headline proclaimed "Africans 'faced with extinction,' " and quoted a U.S. government report that HIV/AIDS will reduce life expectancy in 11 African countries to under age 40 by 2010.
Not quite "extinction," but still disquieting.
The report by the U.S. Census Bureau, delivered at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, said life expectancy in some 50 countries will drop due to AIDS, with those in Africa the prime victims.
We're told that "at least" $10 billion US a year must be spent to slow the epidemic, while "only" $2.8 billion is now being spent. Experts and protesters around the world feel America should be doing more to curb the spread of AIDS.
Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the UN AIDS program, warns "the world stood by when AIDS was spreading in Africa" and urges that we not ignore its spread today in Eastern Europe and Asia.
Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for AIDS, adds his bit by knocking Canada's "abysmal, wholly inadequate" efforts in the AIDS fight - $53 million over five years, most of it going to projects in Africa. This is on top of Canada's $50 million pledged for AIDS research.
Money spent on research for an AIDS vaccine is one thing, spending billions in Africa ostensibly to alleviate the problem is another.
AIDS is one disease that's totally preventable by behaviour and lifestyle. With the exception of children born HIV positive (the real victims in Africa), there's little "excuse" for most people contracting it.
The spread of AIDS in Africa is primarily the fault of Africans - especially some African governments which have not only prevented treatment of the disease, but have all but denied its very existence.
Even today, the president of South Africa, like others, blames AIDS on colonialism, poverty and some vaguely defined "white conspiracy."
Some African despots have even accused the CIA of infecting the continent with the virus as a means of undermining regimes and exerting power.
Dangerous even to mention AIDS
I feel somewhat strongly about this, because when I was writing from Africa in the mid-1980s, it was difficult, even dangerous to mention AIDS.
I remember in Bulawayo, in the Matabeleland area of Zimbabwe, talking to doctors and officials, and being warned that any mention of AIDS would bring retribution. Doctors in Zimbabwe felt 10% of the population was infected, but talked only on condition their names not be mentioned for fear of reprisals.
In Zambia, members of President Kenneth Kaunda's family died of AIDS. It was speculated that up to 90% of the military was infected - to be mentioned at your peril.
A Scottish doctor, with 25 years of humanitarian medical work in Uganda, warned that the population was being ravaged by AIDS, and, with grim humour, said that unless the government acted, there'd be so many deaths that Kampala's chronic parking problem would be solved. He was given 24 hours to leave the country. So much for a career of saving Ugandan lives.
Such sensitivities exacerbated the epidemic.
AIDS spread down the core of Africa - the trucking route: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Botswana, Mozambique and South Africa. Truckers who contracted the virus from prostitutes, say, in Nairobi (who are apparently immune) helped spread the disease through the core of Africa and hence throughout the continent.
As well as reflecting a culture of sexual promiscuity, much of Africa indulges in "generational" sex - older men, possibly carrying the virus, infecting young girls who eventually infect their future husbands.
In Africa, women are now more susceptible to AIDS than men. So the most effective way to fight AIDS in Africa is not with money or medicine, but to persuade men to change lifestyles and tradition - not just by wearing condoms but by keeping pants zipped.
Just as Africa is a basket case economically, replete with political tyranny, tribal hostility (racism) and rampant corruption that are largely the fault of Africans and their governments themselves, so is AIDS a problem for Africans to solve, not foreigners.
People like me, who wrote about AIDS in Africa 15 years ago, earned criticism and yawns. For the outside world now to be blamed for "standing by" while HIV/AIDS ravages the continent is unfair and wrong. It is African states which wouldn't tolerate warnings or accept help.
Until Africans accept responsibility for their own misfortunes, misfortunes will continue.
But there was no mention of this reality when Libya's Moammar Khadafy forged the new African Union (AU) out of the old tyrant's club of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). A change in name is not necessarily a change in direction.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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