In early 2007, the former Gambian President Yahya Jammeh declared that he’d invented his own miracle cure for the virus using a mixture of herbal medicine and spiritual healing techniques but many died after administration of his concoctions.
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Forcing thousands of people with HIV to undergo treatment with a mixture of herbs and enchantment he came up with, The Gambia’s former leader, Yahya Jammeh, who left the country a year ago after two decades in power, has been accused of many crimes which include his strange HIV cure program.

Even more bizarrely, Jammeh claimed the cure only worked on Thursdays and Mondays. Not surprisingly, this was denounced as quackery of the most dangerous sort by health experts around the world.

But in The Gambia itself, telling the then president that he was talking nonsense could land one in prison.

Lamin Ceesay, a Gambian health activist who himself is HIV positive was sent an invitation through his charity, asking for 10 volunteers to be the first batch of guinea pigs for the president’s six-month treatment programme, he decided it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.And so the treatment began. Each morning the president would rub a mysterious green paste into the patients’ bodies, while chanting prayers from a leather-bound Koran.

Then, twice per day, they would drink from a bottle filled with a yellow herbal potion. Jammeh refused to say what was in it, despite being told that if he really had found a cure for HIV he could file for a patent and make Gambia rich overnight.

Whatever it was, it gave Ceesay constant diarrhoea. He also caught tuberculosis from another patient, and eventually grew so weak that he had to be transferred back to a proper hospital. Tests then showed that his HIV viral load had soared, and he was put back on the ARVs again.

As the first person in The Gambia to publicly declare himself HIV-positive, Lamin Ceesay thought he was doing the right thing. It was back in 2000, when many people were still ignorant about HIV, and when HIV-positive people had to cope with stigma and prejudice on top of everything else.

On World Aids Day that year, Ceesay plucked up the courage to go public and took part in a street march put on by an HIV charity. It earned him the respect of health campaigners worldwide. But a few years later it also brought him to the attention of Gambia’s president, Yahya Jammeh.

“I thought about just sending other people on the programme, but I feared if I didn’t go myself, it might get me into trouble,” he said.

“I also thought, ‘Why not? It can’t do any harm.'”

That was where Ceesay was wrong. It was only when he arrived at the president’s makeshift clinic at the presidential palace that the ground rules of the programme were explained. No smoking, or drinking tea or coffee. No sex. And crucially, no taking of mainstream medicine – including the anti-retroviral drugs given to him by his regular doctors.

In the end, some 9,000 people are believed to have been treated, although since Jammeh kept all the clinic’s records secret, nobody has yet established just how many of them died.

One thing now seems sure, though – the only “miracle” about his cure was that anyone survived at all.

Immatex:




And in this continent, this man will never be prosecuted for his crimes against the Gambia.

Nutase:
Africa is blessed by God but cursed by man.