At a time when Botswana is struggling under the existential threat of HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 disease burdens, a tragic subculture is unfolding in the bowels and dark alleys of the greater Gaborone region. This underground, unrecognized, and therefore unacknowledged health threat is poised, not only to reverse the gains Botswana has made in fighting HIV/AIDS and related sexual transmitted infections (STIs), but also to worsen this disease burden, and worse; fuel Covid-19 transmissions, infections and deaths, possibly even after the much-anticipated population mass-vaccinations.
The most disturbing thing about this emerging social behavior is its sinister and driving passion to push marginalized groups, vulnerable youth and children, mostly female (ages 13-midthirties), into an underground colony of social outcasts, making them disenfranchised aliens in their own country. This growing parallel economy is swallowing up, harrowing, and spitting out these people with reckless abandon. Those who don’t get out die in this harsh underground world of sex and drugs economy.
The majority of those caught up in this dark world suffer routine brutal incidents of wanton entrapment (and the accompanying constant exposure to HIV/AIDS and related STIs), systematic violations, humiliations and personal shame. It is a degrading, brutalizing and dehumanizing world. Distinct Communities exist here. They have diverse 1) sexual orientations (Men having sex with men, commercial sex workers, sex slaves, underage exploitable transgender youth, injecting drug addicts, bisexual/heterosexual married men, and itinerant subcontinental drug lords; 2) demographic profiles, 3) nationalities, 4) specific/multiple debilitating addictions and 5) strongly entrenched power hierarchies; dominant, ruthless and, often, murderously dangerous.
Life in these High-Risk Addiction Communities (HRACs) is characterized by miserable bleakness, frequent rape, petty crimes, theft, robbery, stabbings and bodily disfigurements, sexual slavery and exploitation, ritual bloodletting, and pornographic subjectivities; all this under the most unimaginable atmosphere of personal insecurities, powerlessness, and helplessness.
What drives these inhuman and horrible actions in this almost surreal underworld?
Addiction. Addiction to drugs, and addiction to alcohol. And these are Batswana citizens like you and me. They come from poor families. They come from rich families. Some are orphans. They have parents in Parliament, in the Civil Service, and the business world. They have parents in prisons, poor households, the House of Chiefs, and the professional world. Students are found here also. School drop-outs, and university graduates.
Only one thing unifies this sad agglomeration of Botswana’s Unfortunates: Addiction, the worst possible equalizer. The second common feature is, of course, social wretchedness. And this unfortunately leads to pariah, and that unimaginable moral burden; rejection by friends and families. The rich dump their “difficult” children here. The poor do the same with their “naughty” children, and the professional and public service classes have no moral qualms exiling their “rebellious” children to this underground trinity of drugs, sex and death.
Just how big is this problem?
The youths involved in this perilous squalid enterprise have approached BONASO for help. What they want, in their own words, is to live like other humans and do ‘normal people things in broad daylight.’
For now, the numbers average a conservative figure of 4, 400 people living in clusters of about 400 addicts, in, and around; a) Bontleng, b) Gaborone West, c) Extension 14, d) Broadhurst, e) Tlokweng, f) Block 6, g) Block 8, h) Old Naledi, and Mogoditshane and the military camps/ bases. These numbers are growing, and these Centers of Addiction Concentration (CAC) have already spread to Mahalapye, Serowe, Selibe-Phikwe and Francistown. Their clientele being mostly married men (many of them addicts as well), the Risk Exposures (TE’s); (STI’s, HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, physical violence and harm) to the parties involved, and the Nation, are huge because condom use is very low; ‘the men do not want to use them’, and desperate addicted men, women and children-craving for quick fixes-hurriedly consent to these RE’s by bargaining for higher prices.
The Trap Houses (TH’s; that’s what they call them) they live in are ‘virtual’, temporal, crowded, unhealthy and frequently change tenancy due to infrequent incomes, and addictive defrayment of earnings to drugs; mostly cocaine, ma-dyna, nyaope and alcohol.
We have seen these things and we know how these Communities are organized, and how they operate. The HRAC’s have been engaging with us through meetings, and tours of the Centers of Addiction Concentration (CDC), brothels and ‘lodges’. We have received first-hand accounts and testimonies of some of the dangers and hazards involved in such precarious, vulnerable and opportunistic informal occupations, and we aim to do the best it can to help them, to save their lives, and, in the process, safe also the families of these reckless men-and the Nation at large-for behavior of this kind can only eventually destroy the whole country through the vectors of HIV/AIDS infections and the new terrible specter of Covid-19 disease transmissions.
What can be done?
There is urgent need to create sustainable institutional infrastructures that can support these people, helping them to cope with these harsh realities, to exit this underworld for those capable of doing so, and making sure access to healthcare is open to all HRAC’s and members regardless of the choices they make. We don’t have the resources to do this right now. It is important, however, that this problem is brought out into the public domain to be discussed, and possible solutions to it are found.
We cannot allow this to keep on happening. The parents of these children have abandoned them to the perils of social damnation and horrible early deaths for reasons best known to them. It is not for us as civil society to judge. Every citizen answers to their own moral conscience. Our actions, on the other hand, are driven by a moral public code: the civic duty to do to others what you would like, even expect, them to for you. We also have recourse to petition political leadership, and the constitution, but there, we now know, this social problem is known, and ignored. After all the children of the rich and famous, are also resident in this horrible moral maw; helpless before the worst forces of disease, violence, daily personal injuries, and death…always knocking at the door, and every child counting their blessings by the hour, every day.
We are appealing for help to build infrastructure that can help these children to return to society, to reclaim their citizenship, to live normal lives again. Everyone with the necessary skills and resources can do something to help in the areas of counselling, psychological screening, psychiatric evaluation, rehabilitation, and other people can volunteer other services or contribute food hampers, toiletry; anything that can help.
Remember what HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 are doing to Batswana in your life, in your neighborhood, in your Community, and then try to imagine what is happening to these children, out there in uncaring brutal worlds, ruled by uncaring brutal realities day and night…and remember as well that in spite of all these calamitous experiences these people still want to live just like you and me; they are trying hard to survive these killer diseases just like you and me, and consider how low there are, how vulnerable they are…and these children were once babies to proud parents who no longer now see the need to travel the journey of life with them.
The other thing to remember is that everything happening in this underbelly world affects you. Who knows what the thousands of men, married or not, who use these people day and night take back to their own families, working places and neighborhoods? Covid-19? AIDS? Death?
Yes, some of these people are grown enough to look after themselves, to suffer consequences of their decisions and choices (some of them are already teenage mothers.) But remember also that under the present tyranny of the pestilential Covid-19 regime, Government keeps you under lock and key as it sees fit for the simple reason that your own decisions and choices are no longer trustworthy. Government does not trust you because you are human, perhaps too human. In any health emergency human instincts run wild, often too wild. What we are talking about here is a terrible health emergency, personal decisions and choices-too human-gone terribly wrong.
We ask people to help, not judge. These people behave this way because there is a huge market out there for whatever things they can sell, and that market is daily created and sustained by the passions and interests of rational, rich, and important people, through decisions and choices of their own…and poor parents who cannot do the best things possible for the growth and personal safety of their own children through decisions and choices of their own…no one has a right to judge, or ignore, or stigmatize, or censure these people.
Baseline knowledge suggests the first beneficiaries of an early intervention will be underage children who must be accommodated elsewhere under supervised healthcare and support, or be returned to their families, and back to school (legally they cannot make decisions of their own.) Families in and around Gaborone will also benefit from less exposure to sexual disease infections and Covid-19 transmissions and Ministry of Health and Wellness will also learn from these actions through the involvement of their staff and institutions in the activities of the action. It is envisaged that many people trapped in this nightmare will take advantage of this intervention and turnaround their lives and, more significantly, that prevention awareness campaigns and direct institutional actions undertaken will deter and discourage young, vulnerable, marginalized and addicted Batswana from entering these HRAC’s, choosing instead to seek effective and more rewarding public health interventions.
We have a plan and the purpose of the plan action derives from the questions BONASO asked itself after several meetings with representatives of these HRAC’s and guided tours of their working environments and direct exposure to the violent and painful patterns of their daily lives:
1. What practical outcomes can remedy situations and scenes like these?
2. What direct interventions can produce such outcomes?
3. What precisely can be done to enable sustainable conditions for service delivery here?
BONASO views the purpose of this action at several interfaces. First, the interface between the affected individual and his or her family. Second, the interface between the affected individual and his/her children. Third, the interface between the affected individual and the healthcare system. Finally, the interface between the individual affected and the opportunities available for personal freedom and self-advancement out in the larger society regardless of how limited these might be. BONASO defines, and justifies, this intervention as a function of its own processes, setting up these processes as indications of civil society unique contribution the social and moral economy of the country.
Gaborone is crowded, housing is poor and insufficient. Institutional support for struggling livelihoods is small, slow, infrequent and excludes the majority of individuals, poor households and homeless youths who have almost zero chances of getting jobs, and daily struggle, instead, with growing addictions to substance abuse, alcoholism and exposure to complicated social problems associated with crime-infested neighborhoods. Lack of opportunities for independent lives, low incomes that barely cover basic necessities, the frustrations of living on the margins of affluent neighbors, or living under the parenting of authoritarian patriarchs (or within dysfunctional families), a failing education system, eroded social entitlements and protections, weakening family bonds and a sense of social alienation, are all rapidly driving these youths into an underground informal economy predicated on the worst possible risks to personal health, risks to the individual self, risks to self-concept, to human life itself, and the hazards of unsanitary and dangerous environments.
These people are crying for help. The proposed action specifically aims to address the tragic entanglements of those already entrapped in this psychology of addiction and have no means of getting out, or somehow improving their personal safety within the entrapment atmosphere, or reconnecting them with family and friends in the world outside this nightmare.
The above action will be achieved through the promotion of health issues education on the part of sex workers and their clientele, and campaigns to make health services-psychosomatic, psychiatric, psychological, and primary healthcare-more responsive and closer to HRAC’s. The intended beneficiaries live for just one thing: to satiate drug cravings through sex-for-money enterprises. They have high figures of sexual infections. Almost no food to eat. Housing and tenancy are unavailable to the majority of them. Medication for chronic conditions is inaccessible or not taken regularly. Some Health facilities refuse to admit them, and they report cases of stigma and discrimination.
Consequently, areas proposed for this action will include facilitating access to basic necessities like food, medicines, shelter and also counselling. BONASO also commits to workshops and awareness campaigns around issues of personal negotiation skills, communication skills, and widespread sensitization about issues of sexual reproduction rights, human rights and the most critical things for such high-risk communities; the primacy of health seeking behavior in the face of constant violent sexual degradation, and the potential to harm other citizens through escalated transmissions of HIV and Covid-19.
BONASO, in collaboration with other partners, plans on putting up a Soup Kitchen for them and, as mentioned, to source psychological counselling for them; at least a few hours a week for those who need the service (and many already admit to the desperate need for this.) Another plan is for emergency transport for them in hours of dire need and then necessity to reconnect them to the national health system, and eventually to reintegrate them into family structures through group counselling sessions for them, their parents, and their children.
We take very seriously our overall objective and civic duty to create National awareness amongst civil society organizations, development partners and Batswana about the destructive power of sex and drugs cultures and make clear this health, psychological and medical scourge is already burning like wildfire throughout Botswana, taking leadership of the necessary struggle to rollout arms, upscale national effort and prevent the ruination of individuals, families, households, communities and the country.
