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Anti-AIDS dispute : Did any country follow a condoms only policy?
2005-09-03 07:21:05
By Ani Jozeni
Shouting was partially to be heard over the airwaves in the past week as experts from different areas were being asked to comment on a dispute between UN agencies, and the US.
A major United Nations agency, UNAIDS (charged with the fight against Aids), was expressing intense concern over the short term and likely medium term impact of a shift in tone concerning condom use in Uganda. It’s now virtually a past idea.
The point of dispute was that there is a great de-emphasis in Uganda, and it is definitely the same situation in Tanzania, in haranguing youths (in particular) to use condoms.
Instead a more serene outlook has been adopted, asking cagey schoolgirls and perhaps unimpressioned youths (and presumably adults) to practice abstinence.
As it is analytically the surest way to avoid Aids, it’s the best method to ask youths to follow.
It isn’t just UN organisations’ work which has been paralysed in its propaganda aspect, by insisting on an aspect of behaviour they know it’s unworkable, but others as well.
The leader of the anti-condoms posture in Uganda, the one most intensely preoccupied with ’abstinence’ as the panacea in preventing Aids, is the born-again wife of President Yoweri Museveni. As the lady is in her 50s by now, is she talking to the youth?
Locally there has been expressions of this shift of emphasis and the results were perhaps not as predictable as they are saying it is the case in Uganda.
But there is a difference because the latter was the showcase of an effective anti-Aids strategy, which now risks entering into palpable confusion on account of spreading a message of ’abstinence’ in a world where values of freedom are intensifying daily. This has people worried.
What however is surprising is the way in which the dispute about condoms and abstinence has been taken up by the contending sides, namely UN agencies, and the US.
The latter, through a leading official of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), held that hitherto Uganda was pursuing a ’condoms only’ policy which he said had failed.
But officially everyone knew it was pursuing an A-B-C set up, like all of us.
The question is when can it be said that this policy is ABC (abstinence as priority, and being faithful in case one has an associate or is in marriage proper, or using condoms in the absence of the other two options) is not being followed.
Not a single country has ever declared that it follows a ’condoms only’ policy the way the US is claiming, but then it has a point.
It wasn’t hearing anything in earlier slogans but using condoms.
If it is reduced to this kind of message then it can be perfectly understood, that there were only slogans on condoms, with little or no interest in abstinence, or being faithful.
When these aspects came into an advert, it was merely to show that they were either impractical, or the mind can’t focus on the same, but was wholly and unavoidably drifting towards casual sex.
The use-condoms became a rallying podium for casual sex, etc.
Basically that is what the ’moral majority’ is taking issues with, that it is no longer acceptable that youths all over the world be pushed towards sex at whatever age, by all means.
They were being harangued wherever they are that almost all occasions are fit to talk sex, even if one just met a stranger in the bus they could pick up the topic, and according to condom merchants, agree thereon. All what remained is to fetch the condom.
For moralists or say religious people and traditionalists of various orientations, there is a healthier climate now in the war against Aids, while NGOs up to the United Nations are sounding the alarm.
But then this is an acceptance of a more intense kind of failure, than whatever policy failure NGOs may say this shift in the US policy interest implies. How much of a campaign is needed so that a mentally fit person uses a condom?
Using a condom is more or less like boiling water before using, and no one ever demanded that constant campaigns be carried out on radio and television that people should boil water.
If therefore anyone finds it fit to drink water before boiling, and is totally unaware of dangers, what methods can be used to reach such person? And who will ensure that he or she won’t forget the message that same instance, and do the same?
Before the 15th international congress on HIV-Aids took place in the Thai capital of Bangkok mid last year, it was being estimated that up to 90 per cent of the population knew something about Aids.
As usual the leagues of NGO activists believe this knowledge has arisen out of campaigns, and thus there needs to be sustained targeted campaigns, etc in the same manner.
The facts may be entirely different, if one checks out.
While there is no need to suggest that campaigns as such look like entertainment pieces, for instance by Beyonce Knowles and others of Destiny’s Child in their now paled appearance, a few facts may help to counter the campaign point.
There were thousands of deaths related to AIDS virtually in each village, or at least ward, with each village in the country burying at least a hundred of their own. Or most villages, to wit.
It isn’t hard to her in ordinary conversation how a family buried its adult children (sons and daughters living or working in town), one after another.
One instance that has been heard in a village somewhere in Mwanga district was a family which buried six children one after another on a graveyard on the homestead.
The level of shock, repeated shock and reinforces shock caused by AIDS is incomparable with anything else hitherto.
Still there are basics of human nature which even AIDS cannot change, for instance the cold and hot way in which the mind organises information.
The human mind keeps away painful memory bits so that comfort is possible in the shortest while possible after severe pain, mental jolt or such other experience has occurred, and it is just fine humans are structured this way.
Ultimately it is the worst obstacle to effective prevention.
Because human beings live in the instant though they are guided both by long term memory and aspirations to the future, people often act normally in sentimental attachment, even with AIDS.
That’s where a condoms message becomes pivotal, so that the mind doesn’t begin to rub the idea away little by little, or careless men having to be reminded, often rudely, about it.
But if all these deaths haven’t taught them, what on earth can?
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