The HIV/AIDS Pandemic- A Dehumanizing Factor

By

Jacob Ntuntu

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Africans are also challenged to provide solutions to the predicament of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This problem has paused a challenge to the development of the continent draining both the human and financial resource that would have been instrumental in bettering the lives of the people on the continent. The most recent reports as recorded on the HIV/AIDS world statistics show that Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for at least 30 million cases of people living with the virus out of about 40 million cases worldwide. This is in comparison with the 24.5 million people who were living with the virus in Sub-Saharan Africa at the close of 1999. While the population of Sub-Saharan Africa only represents 10 percent of the world population, the region has represented more than  70 percent of HIV/AIDS cases world wide (Stille 2000 : 59).  The virus slays both the young and the old though its gravest impact has been felt among the most productive age of between 15 and 49 years.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has paused a great challenge to human life, to the economy and to leadership development at  large. According to the World Book: “The high AIDS infection rates in Africa reversed decades of progress in economic development, education, and health care, which had resulted in longer lives for many Africans” (Stille 59 : 2000). Millions of African children have lost either one or both parents to the disease  since it  emerged in the early 1980s. More than 1300 teachers are reported to have died of AIDS in the first 10 months of  1998 (Stille 2000: 61).

But another thing that is true about this pandemic is that it has a way of  dehumanizing the people it attacks. Moreover, its major source of transmission is undeniably the inhuman practices that people engage in like immorality, prostitution, homosexual behavior and infidelity. O’Donovan writes: “The truth is that well over 90 percent of all those with AIDS are still  infected through sexual sin” (2000: 105). All who are involved in attempts to mitigate the impact of the disease agree that correct behavior is the best remedy to the disease. Re-affirming the ubuntu of the African peoples should, therefore, involve emphasizing the high moral standards that the African people have always embraced and which the Bible clearly upholds. To be morally upright is to be truly human- to possess ubuntu bwine-bwine.   Hence we shall agree with O’Donovan when he contends that,

The only way the AIDS epidemic will be stopped is through a radical change of behavior. People must return to God’s standard of virgin sexual purity before marriage and complete faithfulness after marriage along with taking precautions about blood and syringes  (2000:107).

The church should never bow to the pressure from other anti-AIDS and health organizations who are bent at promoting promiscuity in the name of using condoms. The African Church should never bow to the liberal and shallow moral standards of the western Church. If we shall effectively deal with this epidemic, we need to preach a morality that is espoused by the Bible and is true in our culture. It is both unchristian and culturally incorrect in Africa for women to parade themselves as sexual workers, for men to marry men, or women marrying women, and for people to be sexually offensive either in practice or conduct. The Bible teaches that the sexual rights are only to be enjoyed in a legal marriage set up and that both spouses should practice the highest standards of fidelity. A people who are truly human will embrace moral uprightness.