InterPress News Service (IPS); Wednesday, 6 August 1997.
Remi Oyo

"The more we keep issues of AIDS under the cover, the more difficult it will be dealing with the disease, until it is too late," Eka Esu-Williams, the Resident Advisor of AIDSCAP told IPS.

Esu-Williams said that awareness of the disease in Nigeria has grown through the assistance of international donors like AIDSCAP and local NGOs working in the country. But, "there has been resistance in behavioural change," she added.

The AIDSCAP Resident Advisor admitted however, that there is still a high level of cynicism among Nigerians about the disease's prevalence. According to health authorities, between two to three percent of the deaths in government hospitals nationwide last year were due to AIDS.

Denial, Esu-Williams said, often is one way people deal with the incurable disease. "I think it is not unusual, it is a form of denial...it is one thing to deal with such denials, it's another to deal with the reality of the prevalence of the disease," she said in a telephone interview.

AIDSCAP, an affiliate of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has operated in Nigeria since 1992.

According to Esu-Williams, the organisation's work in Nigeria has focused on building local NGOs' capacity in the areas of awareness and blood screening, and it has started outreach programmes to reach high-risk groups. The organisation has spent at least five million U.S. dollars on its programme so far.

But Nigeria's former Health Minister, Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, said this week when he announced his brother's (Fela) death that: "I believe that the government is letting this country down in the fight against AIDS".

"The information I have about the AIDS situation in this country since I came back (two weeks ago) is that the government's efforts to prevent AIDS in our country is most abysmally low," Ransome-Kuti said. He was health minister for eight years under former President Ibrahim Babangida.

Ransome-Kuti also said that the money spent at the federal level to fight the disease is low. "Perhaps at the federal level, the money allocated to fight AIDS is less than 300,000 Naira (about 37,500 U.S. dollars) in the budget for a year. It is my belief that the government is depending on donors," he said.

Ransome-Kuti, now a consultant for the World Health Organisation (WHO), said recent statistics available to him show that whereas 10 cases of AIDS a year were reported at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) here about seven years ago, "we now can see up to 300 cases a year in LUTH alone".

Statistics in 1994 showed that about 1.7 million Nigerians had the virus which causes AIDS. But the former minister insists that "we don't know how many of us have it and we pretend as if we don't have AIDS in this country".

For a country that sponsored an Organisation of African Unity (OAU) resolution on the disease in 1992, Ransome-Kuti said that he had "not seen any sign that the Head of State of this country (Gen. Sani Abacha) or the minister of health has any interest in fighting this deadly disease".

Esu-Williams said Ransome-Kuti's disclosure of the cause of Fela's death was a good example to the public in a country that stigmatises people with any kind of disease, worse still AIDS.

"I think they (Fela's family) have come out in a very important way to show how exceedingly naive it is not to come out and admit the prevalence of the disease," she said. "People still don't want to give room or space for the acceptance of people living with AIDS".

Garba Shehu, President of the Nigerian Guild of Editors told IPS in a telephone interview from the northern city of Kano Wednesday: "I think that Fela's family has done a great service to this country by disclosing that he died of AIDS".

"It will certainly bring a lot of media spotlight and publicity and generate more awareness, especially as some people still argue that the disease does not exist here or that it is a 'White man's' disease," the Guild's President said.

"Ironically, Fela himself often argued that AIDS was indeed a 'White man's' disease. He thought wrong," Shehu said.

Nigeria and four other West African countries -- Burkina Faso, Cote D'Ivoire, Ghana and Togo -- account for 15 percent of the prevalence of AIDS in Africa, according to the John Hopkins University Population Service. (end/ips/ro/pm97)

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