Chronicle Editor
The National Aids Council (Nac) held a meeting on HIV and Aids with legislators in Kadoma recently.
Two fundamental issues emerged from there — one of them really sad and another potentially controversial.
Nac monitoring and evaluation director Mr Amon Mpofu says elsewhere in these pages today, at least 45 percent of female students at local tertiary institutions were living with HIV and that basically all of them contracted the virus during the course of their studies.
He also made a suggestion that will likely divide opinion – that his organisation was proposing to effect mandatory HIV testing for couples before they could get a marriage certificate.
“We want pastors and magistrates or any other marriage officers to demand proof of HIV testing from couples intending to get married. We need to protect our children,” he said.
Nac has an enormous task of co-ordinating the national response to HIV and Aids.
The organisation has done remarkably well since its formation in 2000.
It has overseen a drastic drop in the HIV prevalence rate from as high as 26 percent to 13,7 percent.
Hundreds of thousands of HIV positive people have been enrolled on treatment while children orphaned by Aids are receiving assistance from Nac and its partners.
Nac has led in the national campaign for abstinence, the need for partners to observe mutual faithfulness and for them to correctly and consistently use condoms during sex.
It is vital to note that these successes were achieved with limited funding while countries that are receiving much more funding from abroad are still struggling.
We applaud Nac for this.
However, the proposal to effect compulsory HIV testing for couples before they could get a marriage certificate, while sensible in the context of the national campaign to curb HIV and Aids among young adults, looks segregatory.
A couple that is deeply in love and is denied a chance to marry legally because a magistrate has asked for an HIV test certificate they don’t have can easily approach the Constitutional Court arguing that their rights have been violated and possibly win their case.
Also, we are unsure what the marriage officer would do if, for instance, the bride-to-be produces an HIV negative test certificate while her man produces a positive one.
We think that marriage officers must have no role vetting partners for anyone; that is a job for couples themselves.
Nac should continue encouraging partners to go for voluntary counselling and testing before they get married and then make a decision whether to proceed into marriage or not on the basis of their respective results after an HIV test.
“If you look at the statistics we have, there are high cases of new HIV infections among adolescent girls between 15-24 years,” said Mr Mpofu.
“We have also observed that about 45 percent of female students in tertiary institutions contract HIV during the course of their studies. Most of them graduate while HIV-positive. There has been a 45 percent increase in new HIV infections among female students.”
This makes for some sad reading indeed for the girl child. This is so because of a number of socio-economic pressures young women face at that stage of their lives and ages.
Research has shown that young ladies contract the virus through unprotected sex with much older men who are willing and able to pay the money that most of the girls are desperately after to do their hair, nails and buy fashionable clothing.
They, regrettably, appear to want to attend to their immediate, transitory wants (not needs) regardless of the long-term consequences of such behaviours.
It is sad but we have no difficulty in appealing to the young ladies to just behave.
Why are they under so much pressure to wear that expensive hairstyle or those costly jeans when they don’t have their own money to buy them?
Why do they think that sex can give them what they want even if it results in an HIV infection yet males of their age and class don’t have those ideas?
Whatever excuses they might want to advance, the female students at university must try harder to behave so that the high HIV prevalence rate declines.
On another note, sugar daddies, those living positively with HIV and those who aren’t, are strongly urged to stop pestering younger females for sex.
Nac has done a good thing, as Mr Mpofu said, by engaging university and college authorities on how they can help contain the occurrence of HIV among their students.
Hopefully, they will come up with empowerment strategies that can assist.
However, seeing the economic challenges that the Government and universities are facing, it is unlikely that the strategies would include payments to enable the young ladies to be able to cater for their monetary needs without having to rely on sugar daddies.
What we see happening is colleges running awareness raising activities on the short and long-term dangers of risky sex.
Having said this, we have to say that we appreciate that some reasons why HIV is more prevalent among female students than among their male counterparts are beyond their control.
Health experts say HIV has a woman’s face not only because of economic factors some of which we have noted but also biophysical ones.
Women have a higher risk of contracting HIV than men because their sexual organ has a larger surface area through which infection can occur.
This is a big causative factor in case of forced sex. Also, it is they whose bodies receive sperm during unprotected sex.
Our message therefore is that the young ladies must behave; authorities can assist by raising awareness and parents and guardians must give their children money and other resources so that they are not tempted to endanger their health by engaging in risky sexual relationships to raise money for clothing, airtime or make-up.
Online Reporter