Written by The Sunday Times  

That Malawi has been devastated by the HIV/Aids pandemic is no laughing matter but surprisingly, there are some people who want to cash in on the desperation by those living with HIV.

Although the whole world knows that there is no cure for HIV/Aids, Malawi has had to deal with herbalists who have over the years claimed to have found a cure for the disease.

While a discovery for a cure for Aids can be good news for everybody in Malawi and beyond and a possible financial muscle for Malawi as people would be flocking here to access the drug or indeed exporting it, it is worrying that most of the claims for a cure for Aids have come to nothing.
 What this means is that our herbalists who make such claims rush to publicise and administer their drugs before inviting other experts to assess the potency of their drugs.

This brings us to the question of the motivation behind this. While some of these herbalists do not charge fees for administering the alleged cure for Aids, they usually ask the patients to give them “whatever little you have”.
And since these patients owe their hope for a cure to these herbalists, the “little you have” most of the times turn out to be more than what the herbalists would have collected if they were charging for the services. So it would not be wrong to conclude that most of these herbalists want to cash in on desperate patients.

Apart from this selfish motive, it is also worrying to learn that some of the drugs administered to Aids patients—whose immunity is already low—are in fact poisonous and hazardous.
Now where is the expertise in such herbalists when they start administering poisons to patients? Under such circumstances, could we say they have the welfare of the patients at heart?

We believe the magistrate in Balaka has missed an opportunity to stop this madness by our herbalists by giving out a very lenient sentence and no wonder Kaliati is non-repentant on the matter. By the way, nothing is said how he has been punished for his role in this matter.

We believe that these herbalists should have been punished severely because they were playing with people’s lives, most of them already in very precarious situations. What if people had died of this poisonous drug—that is if none has already died. What these people committed was a very serious offence and deserved a stiffer punishment that would have acted as a deterrent to others with similar intentions.

People living with HIV and their families have enough problems and no-one should take advantage of their situations to make easy money. That is immoral, insensitive and selfish. It stinks, it has to be stopped forthwith.

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