The leadership of former president, Festus Mogae, paved the way and set a much more grounded approach to the HIV challenge in this country. President Ian Khama's decision to carry on where Mogae left off on this issue means that we are on our way to showing the world how to successfully deal with the HIV challenge. Of course, the spiralling costs of such programmes as anti-retroviral drugs means that with time the country needs to develop a cheaper approach. We support government's position that a new approach emphasising safe sex behaviour and prevention of further infections is the correct way to go. Just yesterday, a press release from the Botswana Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership indicates that our programme has a prevention rate of 99 percent. That means 99 percent of potential mother-to-child-infections, and more importantly, on this Day of the African Child, it means hundreds of thousands of children's lives saved! These are successes we should celebrate. We are of the position that a child-centred approach to development would be the best guide to sustainable and people-relevant policy-making. It is, however, important to mark these successes, limited as they are, to see how far we have taken our HIV policy, especially with regard to the manners in which it affects children. We believe that every policy that makes a difference in the lives of children is important. On other matters, we also want to take this opportunity to recognise former minister, Margaret Nasha, under whose stewardship the Children's Bill was piloted through Parliament. We think this piece of law offers proper protection and recognition of children's rights. We think such issues as divorce, abuse, parental responsibility and others have been well-covered and it is time now to move into setting up the proper institutional instruments to make sure the law becomes an active player in children's lives.
The World Cup debate should rage on
Now that the 2010 FIFA World Cup has finally arrived, and everyone has had time to digest the implications, it is time to let the proper debate begin. The excitement around the World Cup and the pride it brings to the continent suggests, in some circles, that the Africans should not even begin to consider interrogation of the relevance of the project to the immediate day-to-day problems of the citizens. Apart from the improvement of Africa's image abroad, what will the World Cup do to the actual lives of our people? That is the important question. Apart from FIFA's somewhat misguided logic that a trickle-down dynamic would inevitably lead to the World Cup changing the lives of people in shanty towns, should Africa consider hosting such events in the future? Does it make sense to spend such amounts on hosting these events when all around there is so much squalor and neglect? Going forward, Africa will have to debate this in a rational way.
