Africa 'falling short on Aids'

2004-05-10 19:50

Cape Town - African leaders, for the most part, have not shouldered their responsibility in dealing with HIV/Aids, said the head of the Aids Law Project, Mark Heywood, on Monday.

"I think Africa is responding appallingly to the Aids pandemic," Heywood said in Cape Town at the second African conference on social aspects of HIV/Aids research.

"We have a continent where there are something like 25 or 30 million people infected, and although you can point to certain individual African leaders like obviously (Yoweri) Museveni in Uganda, like the president of Botswana, it's individuals still who are identifying that this is a critical issue.

"What we need is the mass of politicians, from the trade ministers, to the ministers of finance, to the health ministers, all to say this is a critical thing facing our country and we've all got a responsibility."

Heywood, who is also national treasurer of the Treatment Action Campaign, said accepting responsibility also meant accepting financial responsibility.

Rights of HIV-positive people

African countries' access to international money should be combined with a greater willingness to use their own budgets to tackle the problem.

"Where there are African governments that have responded properly, such as Senegal, Botswana, Uganda to some extent, unfortunately it's the exception rather than the rule," he said.

Heywood also said few African governments had done anything to turn their international commitments to protect the rights of HIV-positive people into actual protection.

"Most people with HIV in Africa still encounter discrimination, they still encounter stigma. Many people still lose their jobs.

"The problem is that the human-rights violations weaken prevention programmes, and they weaken treatment programmes.

"If a person is so scared of testing because testing may lead to discrimination, dismissal, they won't test in the first place."

Social environment 'needs to be urgently changed'

In South Africa, the uptake of voluntary counselling and testing was low. Most of the estimated five million people infected with HIV were unaware of it.

Now that treatment was becoming affordable, the social environment around HIV/Aids also had to be urgently changed.

One way of doing this was by introducing laws; another was by making sure political leaders were much more open about HIV infection.

Another was by saying clearly that people who tested positive would benefit from the positive result rather than being adversely affected.

- SAPA