South Africa's Damnation

"We've known how bad the statistics are for sub-Saharan Africa for some time. This is especially troubling for South Africa because with its hospitals, clinics and resources it could be the best country at dealing with this. But I am not sure that they are using their resources effectively.
"How is it, for example, that Uganda, with a much smaller GDP and fewer resources, has managed to tone the infection rate down. The same is true of Ghana and Rwanda. They've managed this through training and sustainable projects."
"What we still don't know is overwhelming because many people have not been tested. It could be as high as two-thirds of the country.
"The good news is everybody has access to these drugs in government hospitals.
"But if you live in the middle of nowhere, with no fridge, no electricity, no running water and no food, it is hard to take strong medication if it needs to be taken when you eat properly."
"I do hold hands with these girls, but it is more important that I give them information so it gets into their heads that this disease kills. For the young girls, not many fathers come. With most of the girls, you find that there has been more than one partner, so you don't know who infected them.
"They get pregnant at parties where they get so drunk they don't know who they slept with."
"The culture allows people to be promiscuous. A man can have four, five, six, seven wives. In some villages people have pretty much slept with everyone else. In one week the virus can be passed off to everybody."
Jolie Nkusi, consultant-monitor HIV/AIDS statistics in South Africa for USAID

It isn't just 'a man' who can have five wives and more. It is, in fact, a very special man, Jacob Zuma, the current head of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, and currently president of South Africa, who has five wives. Not only has he five wives, not only does he spend public funds grandiloquently on building mansions for them, but he is horribly ignorant of the causation of HIV/AIDS, and he is, like so many South African men, a rapist.

Not that his immediate predecessor as South African President, Thabo Mbeki was any less ignorant of what causes HIV/AIDS. He characterized it at one point in his presidency, as a sinister plot by the West to infect South Africa with the dread disease. Most South African males believed that a potently reliable cure for HIV/AIDS was simple enough; to rape a virgin. Under Thabo Mbeki his health minister practised crackpot science and touted it is a measure of HIV/AIDS avoidance.

So it is hardly surprising that about a third of the women in South Africa's maternity wards give birth to babies carrying the HIV virus. Nor is it surprising that there are so many South African orphans whose grandmothers have the task of lovingly raising them, after the death of their parents from HIV/AIDS.  Moreover, it is estimated that about one in five women who give birth in Pretoria, the country's capital, are high school girls.

About 20% of the adult population lived with HIV in 2009, according to the United Nations. Now, it is estimated that between 28% and 30% of mothers carry the virus. South Africa "lost ten years in this fight" against HIV/AIDS, according to the manager of a hospice offering palliative care for AIDS patients in their final days. That loss was accounted for by former President Thabo Mbeki's insistence that poor nutrition caused the immune system collapse.

Maternity ward nurse Sylvia Lamola has the unusual task of persuading new young mothers not to breastfeed if they are infected with the HIV/AIDS virus. "We tell them not to breast feed, but if they go home and don't do that, their families ask questions. We give them a bottle but that requires an explanation to the parents. Because of the culture they dare not tell their families that they are infected.

"It saddens me to see a girl of 15 with such problems. f she is pregnant and positive, you ask yourself: What is her lifespan? What is her future? What is the future of her child?"

What indeed.