Rawlings blames some African practices for AIDS spread

Former Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings has added his voice to the growing concern that certain African traditional practices and cultural norms were helping to spread or perpetuate the incurable HIV/AIDS.

Rawlings said these practices include wife inheritance and other cultural and behaviours that prevented communities to acknowledge or discuss sexual matters and the use of condoms openly.

Speaking Thursday at the start of a five-day visit to Tanzania as a UN Volunteer, the former Ghanaian leader condemned the customs and called on a rethinking on the part of Africans in light of the severity of the pandemic.

"Time has come that we cannot continue with traditional practices that will keep on claiming our people," Rawlings told reporters on arrival at the Dar es Salaam International Airport.

Sub-Saharan Africa has been far more severely affected by HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, than any other part of the world, according to a December 2000 report issued by the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS.

Africa hosts more than 25 million out of the world's 36 million adults and children living with HIV/AIDS. "The sooner we begin to so something the better," he said.

The overall rate of HIV infection among adults in sub-Saharan Africa is about 8.8 percent, compared with 1.1 percent worldwide.

UNAIDS projects that half or more of all 15 year-olds will eventually die of AIDS in some of the worst-affected countries, such as Zambia, South Africa, and Botswana, unless the risk of contracting the disease is sharply reduced.

An estimated 17 million Africans have lost their lives to AIDS, and mortality is rising. A total of 2.4 million Africans died of AIDS in 2000, compared with 2.2 million in 1999.

"There is a bleak future ahead of us. The statistics are shocking," Rawlings said.

AIDS has surpassed malaria as the leading cause of mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, and it kills many times more people than armed conflicts across the continent.

Rawlings said that the answer to the incurable disease lies in curbing its causes rather than in anti-retroviral drugs that prolong the lives of people living with HIV.

"If we make a mistake that a cure has been found, I do not know what will happen," he warned.

Meanwhile, out-going Ghanaian Minister for Health, Dr. Richard Anane has announced that Ghana would start manufacturing anti-retroviral drugs for the treatment of AIDS patients. Consequently, an invitation for an open tender by local drugs manufacturing companies to produce the medicine would soon be advertised.

Rawlings said the test is going to be on the individual effort - the sense of responsibility to help people get out their state of denial about the facts of the disease and its spread.

"We are hurting Africa. We are hurting our continent," he said of the traditional practices fingered for perpetuating AIDS.

Rawlings is in Tanzania as an Eminent Person for the International Year of Volunteers to highlight ways of combating AIDS.

Renown for spearheading and engaging in many volunteer activities for the development of his country, he took his first trip as an Eminent Person in Botswana in April and later to Ethiopia.

He has led Ghana in the fight against AIDS, which has a national prevalence of 4.6 percent, through increased political commitment and decentralisation of responses against the disease.

Rawlings, who ruled for 19 years, is also credited for bringing to the fore the plight of AIDS in the continent on the international agenda and fora in Africa as well as before the recent UN General Assembly's Special Session on HIV/AIDS.