21 May 2014

A health worker from the Jwaneng District Health Management Team (DHMT) has said that in order to achieve the set target for curbing HIV/AIDS by the year 2016, different sectors need to unite and work towards a common goal.

Ms Masego Kololo said this during a Month of Youth Against AIDS panel discussion which was organized by the Jwaneng chapter of the Junior Chamber International (JCI) recently.

The panel discussion was held under the theme ‘Zero new infections, Zero discrimination, Zero AIDS related deaths by 2016-My Role’.

Ms Kololo underscored the need for different stakeholders such as teachers, parents, traditional leaders and pastors to work together to address HIV/AIDS issues.

“Let us work together towards our common goal because independently we cannot manage,” she explained.

She further said efforts to fight the scourge would continue to be defeated if some policies were not changed. She said condoms were not provided in schools yet people are aware that students were sexually active. Such rigid measures, she noted, were a threat to the fight against new HIV infections which the country aspires to attain by 2016.“Let us not be ignorant towards such situations yet we see them happening,” she said.

Even though some panelists argued that the zero new infections target was attainable, others believed that a lot had to be done in order to reach out to citizens, including vulnerable groups such as prisoners and prostitutes. They said the whole battle involved mindset change and therefore 2016 was too near to have achieved the target.

One of the panelists, Mr Loeto Lesatle from Kgosimpe Junior Secondary school noted that even though zero new infections could be attained through the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) programme, there were still young people who were born with the virus and were now sexually active.

He called for deliberate interventions to combat risky behaviours in young people as well as breaking the stigma attached to their HIV status. He said there was need for sexuality education so that young people were more informed on how to handle themselves and prevent infections.

He also raised concern that students were being impregnated by out of school youth, which made the school efforts futile because such men could not be reached by school interventions intended for students.

Another panelist, Mr Baboloki Sebeelo noted t a lot of outreach programmes were targeting young people because they make the highest number of sexually active population, yet older people were being ignored.

He said it was evident that there were a lot of intergenerational sexual relationships which provide a breeding ground for the spread of HIV in both young and old people.

He regretted that such old people were left out by such programmes yet they were more powerful in relationships with young people and mainly made decisions on sexual matters.

“The message is one sided, yet these older partners are more powerful because of their age and perhaps their economic status,” he said. Nonetheless, a pastor from Revelation Times Ministries Mr Philemon Ramono argued that wrong deeds should be condemned so that people could change.

He said a lot of times the arguments were liberal towards situations which are not supposed to be happening and this makes efforts to fail. He said people should be able to differentiate right from wrong because “not everything that is permissible is beneficial”.

He said distributing condoms in prisons and schools would basically be giving prisoners and students ammunition to continue with risky behaviour. He also noted that as a church, they believe people should reconcile with God and change their destructive behaviours.

He also said they condemned discrimination by teaching people that everybody was equal before the eyes of God, and should be seen as the image of God. Mr Moalosi Rathari of the JCI concurred that prisoners should be made aware that they could not enjoy the same rights with non-prisoners.

He said as a behavioural change measure, it was appropriate for prisoners to be stripped of their sexual rights to send the message to the people. He said the same thing applied to children, whom he said should be made aware of the boundaries between having rights and abusing such rights.

“As people we have the tendency to abuse our rights and this eventually leads to problems,” he said. Ends