The National AIDS Council (NAC) - chaired by retired president Festus Mogae - has put a set of challenging recommendations to national institutions for consideration and eventual adoption and implementation. The process is already underway because earlier this week, a radio news item indicated that the House of Chiefs is already debating the recommendations. Unsurprisingly, a number of the members of the House expressed outright opposition to the recommendations related to the legalisation of homosexuality and prostitution, and the distribution of condoms in the country's prisons. They rejected these as both unchristian and contrary to Botswana culture.
Despite this discouraging start to the consultation process, I write today (as I have done a few times in the past) to plead with all the authorities concerned - including the House of Chiefs itself, if it is still debating the NAC report - to consider the said recommendations with the seriousness that they clearly deserve. The recommendations deserve to be considered with utmost seriousness because they are a key part of the overall effort of the NAC and the nation as a whole to deal as effectively as possible with what is still a potential threat to the survival of the Botswana nation: the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The pandemic is an enormous consumer of scarce national resources to the detriment of other equally deserving national priorities. Thanks to the untiring efforts of Festus Mogae during his time as president, this country has never had to bear the entire burden of funding its anti-HIV/AIDS programmes. The international community has been of tremendous assistance in this regard, and I have no doubt that our entire nation is most grateful for this generosity. However, we cannot afford to assume that this will always be the case, for that would be unrealistic. And even if the assistance were to continue indefinitely, neither could we assume that it would always be at the same levels of generosity that we have tended to see over the years. It is therefore very prudent of the NAC to be constantly in search of new ways of intensifying its and the nation's war against the pandemic.
