| Assistant Minister Prof Wangari Maathai
yesterday claimed that HIV/Aids
was a biological weapon manufactured by the developed
world to wipe out the Black race from developing
countries.
Maathai’s
comments, while addressing a public workshop in Nyeri,
are bound to spark off a major controversy on the
origins of HIV/Aids,
which continues to wreak grief and devastation on the
African continent.
She started by giving her
academic orientation as a student of biology. She said
for decades Africans had been naive in not questioning
where the disease had come from, saying that the theory
that it originated from monkeys was a white
lie.
"We know that the developed
nations are using biological warfare, leaving guns to
the primitive people. They have the resources to do
this," Maathai
charged.
Defending her stand the
assistant minister for environment and natural resources
said if Adolph Hitler was capable of wiping out six
million Jews by burning them, what if he had weapons of
mass destruction.
"That is why Iraq was
invaded. Whoever went there knew what such weapons look
like. You can not go to look for something you have
never seen," she argued. She argued that the victims of
these "biological weapons" have been naive in accepting
any theories advanced without any questions.
"Do not be naive. Aids are
not a curse from God to Africans or the Black people. It
is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded
scientists, but we may not know who particularly did,"
she said.
Maathai
wondered why if the virus was from the Congo Forest
where it allegedly infected monkeys, how come the locals
did not succumb to it until it in the 1980s.
She countered that Aids was a
deliberate machination of some scientists whose sole aim
was to exterminate some races from the surface of the
earth. She told the workshop that the most effective
control method by scientists was faulty because condoms
could not effectively keep the virus at bay.
"If a doctor operating an HIV
Aids infected patient puts on three pairs of gloves when
operating, how is just one condom is expected to prevent
the disease. These gadgets have been known to burst and
to tear," she continued.
She said the masses had very
few choices but to use condoms. She said it had taken
Kenya more than 15 years to realise that Aids was worse
than any other external or internal enemy.
"Kenya is still along way in
dealing with stigma and discrimination meted out to
those affected. Some of the money used to fight Aids
should go towards this area," she
concluded. | 
