Tuesday March, 17, 2009, the pontiff on board the plane headed for a five-day pastoral trip to Africa told reporters;
“The (HIV/AIDS) problem cannot be overcome by distributing condoms. It only increases the problem.”
It’s been only a few hours since the Pope talked to reporters and I already have so many forward emails from people from all walks of life and from all over the world. Some say the media has distorted the pontiff’s words, and other’s are outraged that the Pope had the audacity to say something like that.
The Pope is not saying anything different from what many Africans have been saying since the AIDS epidemic broke out. Nobody’s has been listening but hopefully the world will start to listen to what Africans are saying with their deafening silence on HIV/AIDS and paying for with their lives.
I wrote a few weeks ago about Africa’s resistance to condom use. Because sex and sexual behaviors touch on matters deeply personal and closely linked to specific moralities, values, and religious beliefs, many Africans protesting the use of condoms believe that condoms contribute to the breaking down of self-control and mutual trust.
This concern is well voiced in the words of Kenyan HIV activist Dorothy Kwenze who once said,
“Abstinence education remains the best strategy, especially for the risk group aged 15-25 years. The concept has worked well for Uganda and can work for other African countries”.
Uganda government’s message of self responsibility, “True Love Waits” for the unmarried and “Zero Grazing” for the married found in many HIV/AIDS awareness and education materials is credited for Uganda’s great success in reducing infection rates.
President Yoweri Museveni’s 1987 aggressive grassroots country-wide abstinence program embraced by local communities, schools, religious organizations, and even medicine men/women and herbalists is the reason Uganda today boasts of one of the fastest falling HIV prevalence rates in the world (18% to 5-7%.). Many reports –even those from condon advocates – say Uganda is the only nation in the world that has achieved such success.
But just like the Pope is taking heat for his comments, Uganda’s President took a lot of heat for saying he looks at condoms as an improvisation, not a solution.
“Just as we were offered the magic bullet in the early 1940s, we are now being offered the condom for safe sex…. I feel that condoms have a role to play as a means of protection, especially in couples who are HIV-positive, but they cannot become the main means of stemming the tide of AIDS.”
Although Uganda’s model on HIV/AIDS also educated the population on condom use for protection against the virus, President Museveni’s message of optimal relationships based on love and trust (the African way) is the “genius” behind Uganda’s great success story.
Unfortunately, the Uganda model has not taken off in other parts of Africa because most sub-Saharan African nations have embraced the UN’s pro-condoms model over effective abstinence programs.
The rest is public knowledge. The pro-condoms model has failed, and UN’s own statistics show it.
We can learn from our past mistakes but first we must acknowledge that mistakes have been made. This is the first step forward that will bring us nearer to the truth, even though we may never know the truth for certain.
The epidemic rages on. The fight for African lives just began all over!
March 20th, 2009 
Parker Chuks 
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