The NGO BONELA has announced that it will be going to court to challenge government’s HIV policy, specifically the part of it that discriminates against providing foreign inmates with HIV/AIDS.
It was our hope that as a nation we would never reach this stage.
BONELA says there are currently two Zimbabwean inmates, both of them HIV positive, but who, oweing to government policy are unable to receive treatment.
According to BONELA, one of the two Zimbabwean nationals has had their health deteriorate significantly mainly on account of opportunistic diseases.
As much as they would want to help, prison authorities are helpless and frustrated by the fact that the policy they are supposed to implement literally forces them to leave people who are supposed to be under their care to die even as there is treatment available to save their lives. It must be a harrowing experience to prison officials to watch people under their custody die, simply because they happen to be non-Batswana.
However one looks at this looming legal showdown, the truth is that it has all the hallmarks of a previous one when ten years ago a group of Basarwa took governmenmt to court challenging government’s decision to prevent them from entering the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
After a lengthy and most expensive litigation in the country’s history all the courts up to the highest on the land ruled in favour of Basarwa.
But it was soon to prove a hollow victory when government resorted to some of the most debased technicalities that a government with democratic pretensions can ever employ in its treatment of its own people.
While the hundred or so Basarwa applicants were supposed to be representatives of a much bigger community, government in its begrudged and reluctant implementation of the judgement said victory belonged not to all affected Basarwa but only those who had appeared on the court papers.
This has been the most cold-blooded, spiteful, reprehensible and indeed tight-fisted interpretation of the judgement by a government that was clearly unwilling to accept the findings of its own court but was also showing ruthless prepardness to continue degrading the most subjugated of its citizens.
Coming from a government that likes to pride itself with adherence to justice, the rule of law and indeed respecting the courts of law, the behaviour by the Botswana government has been the most unpardonable in a very long time. To us the issue of the two inmates wasting away in prison because they cannot receive HIV/AIDS treatment is from beginning to the end, an issue of human rights. Far from being a legal issue, it is a glaring example of how far down the tube we have gone as a people when it comes to the low premium we attach to human life.
It is a reminder of how cold those who run the country on our behalf have become even as they continue to sing empty slogans of compassion and empathy.
HIV/AIDS drugs are prohibitively expensive. And we do not need a lecture from any politician to tell us how unsustainable the free therapy program is.
But as BONELA rightly argues, the discrimanination against foreign national inmates clearly is not based on cost analysis.
Rather it is a calous and probaly xenophobic attitude by a government driven by irrational shade retributive justice which seeks to condemn to death convicts that the courts have sentenced not to death but to serving time.
When all is said and done, we are of the view that the legal showdown can be averted, especially if those in positions of power can look for guidance on the key values of human dignity that form the foundations of this republic.
