Aids in Malawi – Is there hope after all?

The first of every December is World Aids Day. Scientists say the Human Immune Virus that causes AIDS became known in Africa in 1984. Twenty-five years down the line, we can’t proclaim that there are still teenagers and older people who don’t know how it is transmitted and its effects.

Malawi is no exception to this. Even the most rural and illiterate people were and are still being taught in their tongues about the disease. So like everywhere else in the world, the duty is to teach our little ones who are below teenage-hood in schools and homes of our experiences about AIDS.

Perhaps it is fitting that on this day I make a brief book review on AIDS. And two of them stand out in my mind for various reasons to our nation. Let me backtrack and give you a better sense of who the two authors are.

Stephen Lewis is the United Nations Secretary General’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Born on November 11, 1937 in Ottawa, he was once listed in 2003 by MacLean’s Magazine as the “Canadian of the Year”. Between 29th to 31st October 2006, he was in this country to receive the 3rd Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Leadership Award.

Two years prior to that, Kachere Publishers saw the birthing of a book authored by the pen-name Frank Ham. The author is a homosexual and an HIV positive who survived 18 years without drugs. He is no stranger to our airports having visited our country no fewer than ten times since May 1999.

Stephen’s book, A Race against Time, is a down to earth book you can read and gulp through without putting it down. His perception is that the Western powers that be have let Africa down. Their response has been slower and far less than in the wars they have fought. It is an apologia to Africans who keep losing their loved ones while the West is standing back and watching.

Frank’s book, AIDS in Africa – How did it ever happen? will make you read in simple strolls then go out for a walk to contemplate. It is an attempt to plumb the depths of AIDS and the impact it has had and will continue to have on the poor.

Like Stephen, there is also a better part of his book that rebukes the West. But there is also a part which speaks volumes about areas where we, Africans, should have done better. Like; could the West have donated money to an African nation where accountability and transparency are unspoken terms? Did all the HIV/AIDS related organizations formulate and carry out rightful courses? Can culture and religion be blamed for high level of infections in cases like polygamy and initiations’ “afisi”?

So where did it all go wrong on Aids in Malawi? To date, our country remains one of the worst hit by the pandemic; at the last count about 15 percent of our adult population was infected and still counting. Why are people getting infected today amid massive awareness?

Commentators have always rebuked us, saying that by nature we are all good at analyzing problems, but few of us offer solutions. So I will not waste paper listing problems but try to suggest some solutions.

The first answer to the problem is knowledge. Voluntary testing should be encouraged so that those with the virus are acquainted about ways to survival. Most of the infected are the active people in the service of the nation within the ages of 18 to 35. We can’t afford to lose their expertise in a short term when we have the means, like the ARV’s, to keep them going for the next ten or more years.

Government must continue to subsidize Anti-Ritral Virals so that they can be accessible to those in need. Non governmental organizations and church groups too must join the bandwagon in rolling out free medicines to the financially worst hit people through the mass funding they get.

Extensive lessons on HIV/AIDS should be encouraged to peers in our junior schools. Some cultural behaviors which encourage promiscuous behaviors should be discouraged. In some cultures and religions that do not forbid polygamy, faithfulness within their yard must be encouraged.

Firmly as I am embodied in the Catholic faith, I fervently advocate to use of condoms without any ill motive of burning the doors into Vatican’s encyclicals. “If you can’t abstain then always use a condom”. Isn’t that the message we have been told since the days we heard about the pandemic and called it “magawagawa”?

Poverty has usually been a factor that has been blamed for the vast prevalence of the pandemic in our country. But can we still say so today? Our poverty is entrenched in ‘Food, Clothing and Shelter’ as our founding father, Dr. Kamuzu Banda, used to say.

Those who have enough food work hard in their field – no miracles! An abundance of yield in their field will bring about an improvement to their shelter – and thanks to Malawians who don’t sit back in their shacks and wait for their government to provide them with free RDP houses nor wait for various grants (as the case in South Africa).  And you do not need a designer labeled clothing to say you have beaten poverty. So who in the right sense could go about selling his/her body because of poverty today? Which poverty, by the way?

Digressing from where all this hell broke lose to this date; the fact is that even if the vaccine were developed tomorrow, the number of people already infected is enormous. Even if a cure were found today, the number of dead is great, and the effect on all those whose lives indirectly have been touched by this dreadful illness will last for decades.

As we Malawians commemorate World AIDS Day, we will remember our loved ones in whose candid sharing of their dying they provided us with valuable moral and spiritual directions. Probably some of us will count ourselves lucky to be here – in the days when affordable ARV’s are holding lives together a bit longer – than the days our dear ones suffered. But above all, we have to remain positive that there is hope.

Hope! Hope that our leaders are accountable and transparent. That cultures have started to gel together the idea that it’s now one man to one woman. That the West is now more interested than ever in African peoples, sending above average donations or canceling our “founding fathers’” huge debts to start off on a new page. And that given a chance, scientists by theory or grace of God will stumble on the best combination to cure HIV/AIDS.
I dedicate this article to the memory of Frank Ham, the author of “Aids in Africa – How did it ever happen”, who died in a motor bike accident in the UK earlier this year.

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