Lagos — The recent claim by President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia that he is in possession of a herbal cure for Hiv/Aids has left quite a few people bemused and as many others out-raged by its audacity.

Speaking during a gathering of foreign diplomats last month in Banjul, The Gambia, the 42-year-old Jammeh had startled his guests by declaring that he cures not just Hiv/Aids but also asthma.

What was even more astonishing was his assertion that the whole cure would be complete in three days flat and that persons infected if examined, would be found negative.

It was not the first time that a cure has been claimed by some herbalists, homopathic medical practitioners and the likes in Africa since the Hiv/Aids pandemic broke out in the later part of the 20th century without an apparent cure. Most of these claims have been found as, at best, exaggerated.

But coming from chief of a state like President Jammeh, the cure claim has become of more than incidental interest to the global community.

And reactions have come thick and fast from both quarters who dismiss the claim and those that hold out hope that The Gambian President may know what he is talking about.

A researcher on Hiv/Aids had dismissed Jammeh's claims as bogus. "A response within three to 10 days and a three-day course is almost inconceivable for a disease like Hiv/Aids, so the fact that someone announces a cure like this is exceedingly difficult to accept." This is what Prof Jerry Coovada of South Africa told the BBC in an interview.

However, Gambian Minister of Health Dr Tamsit Mbow, has pitched in for his president stating that the herbal remedies are taken orally and applied to the body. Dr Mbow added however that "we cannot tell you the type of herbs it will be known to the whole world later on".

All this is mind-blowing in terms of the havoc which Aids and asthma have wrecked on African populations in recent decades and the apparent inability of the world's pharmaceutical and medical researchers to find ready and affordable cures for the diseases.

In human and economic costs alone, these diseases drain the continent of needed resources.

Therefore, for a President to risk his reputation to lay claim to cures to Hiv/Aids and asthma is indeed some piece of good news- if it turns out to be true.

Which is just the problem. Many an Hiv/Aids cure claim have been sensationally made in recent years. And no matter the efficacy of such cures, skepticism has trailed them because they tend not to conform to the scientific way of doing things.

Indeed, it would be unfortunate in our peculiar environment where ignorance and gullibility predispose citizens to believing even the most bizarre pronouncements of their leaders, if President Jammeh had merely been engaging in an ego-trip and attention-seeking.

Still and all, since most of the objections to Yahya Jammeh's cure claims have come from the scientific community which decries the secrecy and immesurability of the claims that "violate every foundation of science and public health", the Gambian leader may well be advised to subject his methods to public scientific inquiry.

That way, if found efficacious, Jammeh's cure would benefit wider society besides making him a very rich herbalist in the process.

Unless reports of the global press are wrong, the claim by one of Jammeh's patients that he has shown great improvement over 10 days of treatment, would tend to show that President Jammeh may have hit the mother-lode of Hiv/Aids therapy.

Otherwise, the Gambian leader may only have succeeded in making a fool of himself besides insulting African herbalists in the process. More tragically, he may have succeeded in misleading his nationals into thinking that Hiv/Aids has a herbal cure therapy luring them further into unprotected sex.

This will be disastrous.