Insensitive remarks about AIDS prevalence

This is a newspaper clipping from a local newspaper in Botswana, called Mmegi.

Insensitive remarks about AIDS prevalence

As a young motswana student studying in the United States, I get to interact with people from different cultures and countries, especially those from the African continent.

I recently had a discussion with a classmate from Kenya. I cannot say whether this classmate is either ignorant or arrogant but I did not like what he said, he mentioned that he is happy that a lot of Kenyans are going to Botswana. According to him, statistics say that 3 out 5, thats 60% of batswana are infected with the AIDS virus, and since Batswana are dying, then we need immigrants help to maintain the population of our country. I found this line of reasoning insulting and repulsive. First of all, I don’t think that his country has enough resources to publish HIV/AIDS statistics for their population. Secondly, I haven’t seen any petition by our government or any official appealing for people to move to our country for the sake of replenishing the population. If anything, we have problems with people living in our country illegally.

Goleba Boitumelo

UNITED STATES

In this letter, Goleba's Kenyan friend tried to make an argument that its good for Kenyans to go to Botswana, based on AIDS statistics he heard. This is called a Statistical Argument because the Kenyan guy concluded that all batswana are dying since his statistical evidence says 60% have AIDS.

In my view people should base everything on things they here, its absurd to even say 3 out 5 batswana have AIDS because what you'll be saying is that if you find 5 batswana students in your class, probability is that 3 of them have AIDS. And we know thats not true because we have more than a thousand students in Malaysia and they were all tested for AIDS and none of them had it. Further more Botswana was brave enough to recognize a problem and want to see how deep it is so it could act on it. Most countries have a high AIDS population but try to hide from it for fear of being stigmatized by the international community. People should face their problems, so should countries.!!