STAYING AHEAD

DICHABA MOLOBE | Friday August 3, 2007 00:00

I do not however think that the organisers will execute me if I let you know about the HIV/AIDS issue. If what the learned men predict - and they are well learned -e turns out to be true - we will have to dig deep into our national coffers to help our fellow compatriots stay alive.

The figures bandied by experts involve real money.
These large sums of money - tuning into millions - got me thinking not only about the obvious damage that HIV/Aids does to the economy. I started to think about the way the fight against AIDS is being waged.

I remembered that when AIDS first hit Botswana in the mid 80s, the communications in response was well crafted. We were made to understand that we were going to win the fight against it by asking Batswana to Abstain, Be faithful and Condomise (A, B & C), almost in that order.

Abstinence would be the first line of defense, followed by faithfulness and if everything else failed condoms. The C was never meant to overshadow the A&B.

However as the years passed, HIV/AIDS was taken over by activists and the ABC message was turned on its head. From there it was politics all the way and the rot set in.
You see many of the people in the NGO sector are typical secular leftists. For them therefore, HIV/AIDS is just like environmentalism, and anti globalisation became the new theatre in the long ideological sphere against Christianity  (read the Catholic church), the West and capitalism.

After all many of these were not amused by the fall of the Berlin Wall. 
A new cause had to be found. It was, as they say; time to extend the war by other means. There were a few problems however.

The best weapons for fighting HIV/AIDS are abstinence and being faithful to one another. The trouble was that church leaders articulated the same message.

Again the Catholic Church came in for a lot of criticism by AIDS activist for stating that if people abstained or became faithful, the Aids problem would be defeated.

Church leaders were accused of being naive because the youth engage in unsafe sex anyway.

However, if you put your secular blinds aside, it is easy to appreciate the force and simplicity of the message of abstinence and faithfulness as preached by the church leaders. If people can abstain and uphold the virtues of honesty, then this would represent a costeffective way of fighting AIDS.

Do we hand over your house keys to robbers because they would rob anyway? The effect of this lazy debating point is that it elevates condoms above everything else. Mars concerts are about condoms and nothing else.

Filed team spends most of the time with model male faemarts and showing people underage kids how to use condoms. Very little is being heard in the form of cheaper way of A& B. The issue is not whether people can not practice A or B. It is that when they can do so they should expect.