A SURVEY conducted by the Car Rentals Association of Ghana (CRAG) among its drivers indicates that most of them do not use condoms during sexual intercourse.
Speaking at the launching of an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign among the members of the association in Accra last week, the president of CRAG as well as Ghana Tourism Federation Council (GHATOF), Mr. Foster Nyarko said that 67% of 100 drivers interviewed clearly stated that they practised unprotected sex with the notion that their sex partners would doubt their integrity.
The report continued that 13% was of the opinion that the use of condoms during sexual intercourse does not permit them derive the ecstasy desired from unprotected sex.
Sad enough was the fact that 10 percent of them have no knowledge in the use of condoms while six percent used it frequently.
A minute four percent held the view that using condoms is a waste of money.
This, Mr. Nyarko stressed, painted a gloomy picture for the association as the issue of AIDS has become both economic and developmental concerns of most nations in Africa and Ghana in particular.
He added that the vulnerability of CRAG drivers and other haulage drivers due to long absence from home on treks, caught the attention of the association to launch the educational campaign on HIV/AIDS.
According the president of CRAG, the national drive to promote and project tourism as one of the mainstays of the economy demands that certain precautions are taken including education of drivers on the pandemic who, he noted, formed a reliable core for the dissemination of information.
He noted that CRAG drivers as facilitators pick women at vantage points to hotels and other places therefore, equipping them with the requisite information about abstinence or the use of condoms against HIV/AIDS infection was the only way to minimize the spread of the dreadful disease.
He reported that the scenario at Asiakwa, Nsawam, Osino and other towns along the Kumasi-Accra road whereby drivers packed trucks with mates watching over them while the drivers do their own thing must be treated as a matter of national concern.
Additionally, Mr Nyarko explained that the situation tends to be more serious when companies between six months and one year hire drivers to the mining areas.
Under such conditions, he said the drivers looking for alternative means of savings, depend on women in order to save the outstation allowances paid them.
In a speech read on his behalf, Mr. Jake Obetsebi Lamptey, minister for Tourism and Modernisation of the city, admonishing the drivers, said that a car rental man is the first contact point for the visitor and whether a visitor would end up in a safe hotel or dwell in cheap vicinity among prostitutes or drug addicts depends, to large extent on the driver who picked the fellow from the airport, harbour, railway station or transport yard.
The minister said it was for this reason that concerns have been raised about what car rental men should wear, because what he wears, says and portrays creaates a positive image for the country.
Mr. Obetsebi Lamptey reiterated that the launch of the AIDS education campaign was appropriate because it is happening at a time that the government is doing everything possible to attract about a million visitors into the country by the year 2010.
He therefore urged other private companies to emulate CRAG in the campaign against the menace.
