King Mswati III is being blamed for the huge incidence of HIV in Swaziland.
The king’s lifestyle and Swazi’s disrespect for women are major causes of the spread of the virus that leads to AIDS.
The criticism comes as a new report is published showing that 42 percent of pregnant women in Swaziland are HIV-positive. This is an increase of three percent in two years and means the kingdom has the worst HIV rate in the world. Average life expectancy in Swaziland is now only 37 years.
King Mswati has at least 13 wives (we don’t know the figure for sure because this is information the Swazi people are not allowed to have) and this encourages polygamy (men having more than one wife) in the country.
Reacting to the report and King Mswati’s polygamy, Professor Alan Whiteside, of South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal University, who has spent years studying HIV and AIDS in Swaziland, said, ‘There are particular gender questions in the country around the role of women and how they're perceived by men.’ He said polygamy ‘is a major issue’.
Whiteside told the Voice of America radio station, ‘This [polygamy] is a problem that we face in that you do have polygamy, which is accepted and respected. What we’ve had until recently is a view of women as being there primarily for men. What I have to say is that legislation in the country has recently changed and the challenge is to change the mindset of the people. And maybe the king has a role in leading this change of mindset.’
Whiteside says that the fact that Swaziland is ruled by a king puts the international community off. ‘... the global community looks on it as not being typical’.
Criticism of King Mswati’s role in the HIV pandemic also comes from closer to home. The Associated Press (AP) news agency reported, ‘AIDS activists blame King Mswati III for doing too little to spread prevention messages and promote condom usage and HIV testing, and they say he sets a bad example by having 13 wives.
‘“The nation, especially polygamous men, look up to the monarch,” Sphiwe Hlophe, who runs a support group called Swaziland Positive Living,’ told the AP.
King Mswati has a poor record on HIV in Swaziland. He was slow in recognising there was an HIV problem in the kingdom and despite the urging of the international community, he would not admit that the virus was in Swaziland and refused to declare a state of emergency. He did this even though it was estimated that 90 percent of the beds at Mbabane Government hospital were filled by people with AIDS.
King Mswati also let Swaziland down after, in response to the rising level of HIV infection, he imposed a five-year sex ban young women. He was one of the first to break the ban when he took a 17-year-old teenager as a wife. At the time he already had one other fiancée and seven wives.
Walter Bennett (a well known ‘rent a quote’ in Swaziland) was once a Swazi Senator and adviser to the King. During this time he said there was no need to continue providing medical support to people with HIV AIDS because they contracted the disease out of choice by being promiscuous. He called for all places of entertainment to be closed to stop promiscuity.
The increase in the rate of HIV infection should now cast doubt on the Swazi Government’s policy of encouraging men to be circumcised. As I have reported before this method of controlling the spread of HIV has been discredited by many medics, but remains a major plank of HIV policy in Swaziland. According to the AP. ‘there are fears that this [circumcision] might backfire by making men more complacent and more likely to have unprotected sexual intercourse’.
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