Another Shithole African Nation

"The program didn't work and my wife and many other people died, either during or after it. Those of us who survived wanted to speak out at the time, but we were too frightened."
"My doctors had told me that herbal cures didn't work. But I thought if I didn't go myself, I might get into trouble."
Nobody ever explained what we were taking, but the medicine gave me constant diarrhea and ... I started getting very sick."
"Whether it was lack of ARVs that killed her [his wife] or the herbal medicine itself, I don't know. But when Mr. Jammeh held a ceremony to celebrate the program's first year of running, I stayed away."
Lamin Ceesay, Banjul, Gambia

"As an educated person, I knew it was all rubbish. But I couldn't say anything against it, even though people were dying, I was attending funerals all the time [2017]."
"[I had] 100 percent confidence in the cure [he claimed in 2007]. It feels as if the president took the pain out of my body."
Ousman Sowe, 64, HIV patient

In this 2007 photograph Gambia's then President Yahya Jammeh, prays while administering his alleged herbal HIV cure to a patient at the State House in Banjul, Gambia, that involves a herbal body rub and bananas. His victims are now seeking preparing a legal case against the now-exiled president. Credit: AP

Mr. Sowe was recruited by Gambia's then-President Yahya Jammeh, to add a tone of scientific respectability to his God-sourced "secret recipe" to cure HIV/AIDS. He had set up his own personal clinic to which he invited HIV/AIDS sufferers so he could miraculously cure them. Mr. Sowe held a degree in public health from the University of Leeds. His British university qualifications conferred respectability on Jammeh's claims, so he was appointed spokesman for the president's clinic and duly praised its miraculous healing power to the media.

As for Mr. Ceesay, he was among the estimated 9,000 HIV-positive Gambians invited to take a place in the HIV "clinic" operated by Gambia's witchcraft-practising dictator who had declared in 2007 he was in possession of a secret recipe revealed to him by the Almighty enabling him to invent his very own miracle cure for HIV. The sole qualifier for those invited to his clinic was that they must surrender their use of conventional medication, and stop taking the antiretrovirals that were prescribed, instead the sole prescription they would ever need was the yellow herbal concoction of President Jammeh.

Professionals in the field of medicine derided and condemned the Gambian President's claims as sheer quackery but that didn't stop him from promoting it. He was a dictator, after all, and who among his population would dare defy him? So when Mr. Ceesay was invited along with other Gambians who were similarly conscripted into the treatment program they complied. Now, the survivors are taking legal action against the man who is no longer president.

He is now in exile in Equatorial Guineau where he has been for the past year. The regional Economic  Commmunity of West Africa States threatened they would remove him by force, urging him to step down from the presidency peacefully. Evidence of widespread abuses that took place during his 22 years in office is being collected by human rights groups. That evidence is inclusive of torture, killings and bizarre "exorcisms" where people were force-fed hallucinogenic potions to make them confess to practising witchcraft against Jammeh.

It was, however,  his shamanic HIV cure that has attracted the most virulent accusations. The secret herbal recipe given to him by God that instead made people more ill and ended up killing them is what has been attracting the most attention. He had gone to the Santa Yalla Society, a Gambian HIV support group where Ceesay worked, asking for volunteers to engage in a six-month course of treatment at his hands.

Ceesay and the cohort with him were to avoid smoking, caffeine, soft drinks or sex and were twice a day given bitter-tasting greenish-yellow liquids while the president massaged a green paste on their bodies, all the while uttering prayers. Bodyguards prevented anyone from leaving until the course was completed. In time Ceesay became critically ill, was taken to a hospital and a doctor who had previously known him commented he was barely recognizable, a mere skeleton of his former self.

Once discharged from the clinic his regular doctors got him back on ARVs, but his wife, also on the president's sham program, had died. AIDS-Free World, an advocacy group based in the United States, has plans to bring criminal and civil cases against the former president. With the knowledge that rulings may be unenforceable in Equatorial Guinea, Paula Donovan, the group's co-director believes legal action will encourage other patients to come forward, and that ultimately Jammeh will be put on trial.

There are African countries which stand out for their horrible dysfunction, countries such as Sudan with its Darfur atrocities, countries like Rwanda where the Hutu massacred the Tutsi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo where mass rape used as an especial instrument of war, represent the most visible horror stories, atop the failures of Somalia, Nigeria with al Shabaab and Boko Haram, and south Sudan to name but a few where sectarian, tribal, clan and ethnic violence is so commonplace.

I very rude parlance, they are shithole countries where their people suffer degradation, privation and lack of human rights.