Mozambicans have a culture of “free and unprotected sex, which must be combatted drastically and urgently”, claimed opposition parliamentarian Maximo Dias on Thursday,
In the debate in the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on the governments five year programme for 2005- 2009, Dias from the Renamo-movement declared “our main poverty is HIV/AIDS”, which he blamed on the allegedly voracious sexual habits of the Mozambican public.
– A cultural revolution at all levels of our social life is important, necessary and cannot be delayed. The national command is to change ones attitude, to overcome uncontrolled sexual appetites, and anyone who can not manage that must at least make sex minimally safe by using condoms, he declared.
Dias claimed there was “absolutely no strategy against AIDS” in the government programme.
In response, Health Minister Ivo Garrido suggested that Dias should try reading the programme, pages 104-110 of which contain a detailed set of measures to be taken to reduce the spread of AIDS.
Far from the programme containing no figures and no targets, as deputies from the former rebel movement Renamo repeatedly claimed, it gives the current estimate that there are 500 new HIV infections among Mozambicans every day, and aims to cut this to 350 in five years and to 150 in ten years.
Dias claimed that over 20 per cent of the Mozambican population is HIV positive. However, the Health Ministry statistics for 2004 show an HIV prevalence rate of 14,9 per cent among people aged between 15 and 49.
This is serious enough: Dias gave no reason for exaggerating the prevalence rate, and chose merely to sneer at “official statistics”. Garrido agreed with Dias on the urgency of tackling AIDS – which was why the government programme talks of treating the epidemic as a national emergency.
An estimated 1,4 million Mozambicans were now HIV-positive, said the Minister. He regarded AIDS as “an emergency that endangers all our development efforts”.
Some of the proposals made by Dias, such as putting the fight against AIDS into the school curriculum, are already in the government programme – a further indication that Dias had not bothered to read it before rejecting it.
For those opposition deputies who believed the programme contained no numbers, Garrido directed them to the section on training health workers. In the coming five years, the government intends to train 124 specialist doctors, around 2.000 mid-level technical health workers, and 2.800 basic level staff.
Increasing access to health care was one of the governments major priorities, said Garrido. In order to reduce the distances people must walk before reaching the nearest health unit, the government intended to build more health centres in rural areas, and to provide better conditions for the existing ones. This meant ensuring they had supplies of clean water and electricity.
Garrido recalled that on a recent visit to a remote health centre in Zambezia province, he had asked the staff what they wanted.
They had not demanded any sophisticated equipment – instead they had asked the Minister to provide them with an oil lamp, so that they would have enough light to deliver babies whose mothers went into labour at night. Garrido regarded health professionals working under such conditions as “heroes”.
The Minister of Education and Culture, Aires Aly, also took issue with those who said there were no numbers in the programme. – You want numbers? Here is a number – we are going to build 15.000 classrooms for primary education during the five year period, he said.
As for a Renamo demand that studies should be undertaken to create just one Mozambican language out of the multitude of Bantu languages spoken in the country, Aly dismissed this as impossible.
– You can not impose one language as the sole national language on all Mozambicans, he declared.
Kilder: Agencia de Infomacao de Mocambique (AIM) oig The Push Journal
