Mildred Barya
31 July 2008
opinion
When I was young and impressionable I had this grand vision of saving the world. It was so easy to dream up a free and fair world where sanity, justice and good health prevailed. It was even easier to engage in activities that could quicken the coming into being of those dreams. Now that I am older, I've since learnt that many of us go through such phases until we arrive at a waking place. I have now known the toughest place to be; the here and now.
Forget the interval for a moment. And don't get me wrong, I am not against dreaming. That's where we all have to start anyway. I cannot imagine how best to survive and change harsh realities without a map of radiant dreams. But we must not stamp our eyes on the map, on the canvas. We are only to look at it for direction, not dwelling. Imagine if we were to focus all our attention on the compass without moving, what would we achieve? And yet it seems to me many of us and a big number of organizational realists are trapped between the dreaming and the coming true, avoiding the here and now. I am writing about all the Millennium Development Goals setters and implementers. They haven't stirred from the map, the deep sleep and soft dream. Here's my analysis.
In the area of HIV/AIDS prevention, the United States government has been criticised for increasing funding for abstinence-only strategies, while religious establishments like the Catholic Church continue to question condom use. The current HIV/AIDS prevention campaign urges women especially, to abstain, be faithful, or use condoms (ABC). This is because women and girls comprise the majority of those found to be HIV positive. UNAIDS 2006 report estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, 57% of adults with HIV are women, and young women aged 15 to 24 are more than three times likely to be infected than young men of the same age group. Based upon these statistics is the short-sighted conclusion that women should be the main target in combating HIV/AIDS. Truthfully, they are the majority that turn up to be tested and their results are easily available. In many countries in Africa, the HIV/AIDS statistics for men are hard to find, if they exist at all. Do we then conclude that the HIV/AIDS campaign should focus largely on urging the women to be more vigilant and careful when it comes to prevention or it should all the more be about empowering the men to be loving, respectful and protective towards the women?
The global community's solutions to HIV/AIDS consistently fail to reflect the reality of women's lives and the broader social-political forces that increase their risks. For most of Africa, HIV/AIDS prevention is more of a security and peace issue, not just reproductive health. It may have started as a reproductive health issue years back but that is not where it has remained as a big problem.
HIV/AIDS and war have a very symbiotic relationship that cannot be simply brushed aside. In former conflict countries like Angola, Mozambique, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and current conflict zones engulfed in political chaos like Congo, Northern Uganda, Darfur, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, Chad, Central African Republic and others, both armed men and civilians have become predators rather than defenders, unleashing sexual violence and terror and the people who have suffered greatly as deliberate targets for rape, defilement, torture, sexual slavery, trafficking, and forced marriages are the women and young girls. I wonder how much of ABC--abstinence, behavioural change and condom use applies in these situations. Yet we are happy to dream and to clap when an increase in Abstinence funds is announced. I stand to be convinced that in the recent Kenya violence, for instance, any one of the perpetrators and rapists used a condom. Obviously, for both the victims and victimizers, there was no abstinence and behavioural change did not apply either.
If an HIV/AIDS test can be carried out in Kenya now, I am certain it would reflect that the number of those infected is high among women, because women are not the ones who go out to rape, defile and possess forcefully.
While the ABC may be an effective method of preventing HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancy, ABC only works under a huge assumption that situations of equally shared rights and conjugal responsibilities between men and women exist, circumstances where sexual consent between adults is possible and one can say no or in a moment of raging passion bank on a condom. The number that falls in this kind of strata is very small, given the harsh reality of vast, war torn Africa. But we have boxed ourselves into the ABC triangle we can hardly see how incongruous it stands out in most of African countries where politically engineered sexual violence is the order of the day. Countries that have been relatively stable over the years like Senegal, Mauritius, Ghana, and Botswana (if you do not count the mistreatment of the San people,) do not exceed 10 and Africa is comprised of 53 countries. This could mean that 98% of the HIV/AIDS money that is concentrated on ABC campaign is wasted money and so will not achieve the desired goal, reason being that more African countries have active violence going on, or have just come out of conflict while others are sitting on a conflict volcano about to erupt.
The 2007 AIDS epidemic update reports that in a number of African countries, behaviour change seems to be associated with a recent decline in HIV prevalence. The truth is that prevalence has declined in all countries where there has been some semblance of peace for the last ten years or so. The lesson is simple. Promote peace and you have reduced HIV. Have one day of active conflict and the HIV positive statistics will shoot up because of the sexual violence that comes with it. It's a war package. The sobering question is whether African governments are committed to fighting HIV/AIDS via peace in the country or like most presidents and the first ladies they want cheap fame and will parade as HIV/AIDS crusaders by preaching abstinence and behavioural change.
We do not need the ABC campaign in most of current Africa. The latest addition towards combating HIV/AIDS is even more hilarious--circumcision. Allegedly, it can reduce HIV transmission by up to 60 percent. If we must rank, I think this is slightly better than Zuma's bubble bath after sex with an HIV positive woman. But circumcision lowering HIV/AIDS risks in the face of conflict and regional insecurity when men are on rampage, I have less faith.
For want of humour, I would like to see cartoonists' drawings of thousands of women about to be raped, stretching out their hands to the men who are about to rape them and asking: Are you circumcised? Have you a condom? Or, Will you be faithful to me? Can we abstain until further notice? The reality perhaps will sink in then that what we are fighting in Africa is not HIV/AIDS as a public health threat but misrule and bad governments.
The civil war in Sierra Leone alone created a population of nearly one million internally displaced people. The genocide in Rwanda saw about 500,000 Rwandan women displaced, raped, beaten and tortured. The violence did not end when the women arrived at the refugee camps. They reported that men walked into their huts at will and continually raped them. On their way to the latrines and to fetch water the women and girls were still getting raped. Self-appointed guards at the water taps and those giving out relief foods demanded sexual favors from the women. After some time, there was behavioural change in the other direction. Women became sexually active and resorted to more sexual partners in the camps in order to receive their portions of food and other basic needs. In Sudan, the ongoing civil war has created about four million internally displaced persons, while in Angola conflict has displaced 2.5 million people and 1.6 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Currently there is a massive refugee crisis in the Great Lakes region, not to mention other areas like the Horn of Africa, Central and West Africa, then Southern Africa. This large group does not seem to be the composition that is likely to benefit from the United States grand intervention that early this year agreed to triple its spending on combating HIV/AIDS in Africa by pledging $10 billion annually over the next five years. The U.N. estimates it will need more than $3 billion by 2010 for HIV prevention efforts in Africa, categorically ABC.
The malaria fight is even more subtle and therefore more deadly in defying global interventions. In my impressionable days I was part of an ecstatic team parading the slogan: Mosquito nets for all. I volunteered my time and a bit of money, got onto the truck, played some loud music for attention--a trick that all advertising companies and crusaders do, and hit the road. We went to a large village in south-western Uganda to distribute mosquito nets donated by the global fund. Within no time a crowd gathered. We spread the usual message, why the people must use the nets, we gave bits of life assurance after the net, and a brief background of our organisation's saving mission statement. I did most of the crisp talking, then started dishing out the nets while chanting the slogan: Make Malaria History. If I must be honest, I gloried in the vain moment and shook hands with the people, sure to write a triumphant activity organization report afterwards. Reduced malaria, how nice! All the nets were taken, especially by the women, some taking more than they needed but explaining that they belonged to large households. We wanted entire families to be saved so we indulged them. Before I could get away from the crusade scene, one woman tapped on my arm and asked a puzzling question:
Read comments. Write your own.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
