last updated: Sunday, July 9, 2006

HIV: The ai is incurable (I)

OR what would you say? Starting with the aitch (the incurable hypocrisy that shrouds the whole affair and makes it properly mysterious, that is), it’s obvious that mankind is alas riding on the beastliness capable of sponsoring the kind of doom that had been foretold about the animal "man", the lord of all beasts, whom narcissism was his unwitting bane.

What I mean here is that every disease aspires to the status of permanence, but I am not saying anything new, for what I have said is only an extension of the scientific truism which defines diseases to be conditions arising from the "rightful" struggle of some animalcules to establish their survival and continuity. Extended on common perception, this definition means that the malaria parasite is as wrong as you are when you build your concept of welfare and good life on the slain lives of the chickens, the fish, cows etc that you consume with relish…

True! Scientists insist, as I hear FIFA does too, to be allowed to say or do things apolitically; yet, true also, they need such freedom (footballers and scientists, that is) in order to bring out the best and unadulterated results of their work. If you doubt this, then take a visit to any science lab in the nearest university (well, I am assuming we are talking of ideal settings here); now take such a trip and see what scientists use money, effort and brains for! Okay, could you imagine that there are scientists who labour just to prove something about a paramecium (I hope you remember what this is, anyway) –that the most important factor affecting the reproductivity of some rather inconsequential microscopic little thing is meiosis rather than mitosis; or that the coefficient, by which a certain equation was to be multiplied, was only nearly off the mark, even though there would be no adverse effect within a given range of change in value…

Again, true! These are the things that scientists would want to do, which would make meaning only among the tiny tribe of them. Remember "Eureka!"? that maddening i-found-it exclamation was not in celebration of anything immediately beneficial to the common man; it’s importance and import was meant for the tribe of scientists engaged in a who-comes-up-with-the-next-finding kind of thing. And it was Archimedes turn. Simple!

So much for science and scientists.

Traditions. You only have to pink a little further into the quiddity of customs, and you would find that their requirements and goals are often, like it is for scientists as a tribe, understood by only a tribe in question. An anecdote will serve here. I once met a Sokoto man, whom exigencies of modern work and necessitated him to live in Kaduna for about fifteen years before we became friends. In the course of the fifteen years, he had gone through the trouble of traveling across many hundreds of kilometers for several times in order to fetch for himself a wife in accordance with custom, in spite of the many girlfriends he owned up to have had within the vicinity of his home in Kaduna.

Tarry a little, dear Reader. You see, by the time I met my friend he already had sired a son, who then had successfully attained about eleven years of age. Now the lad was already proving to be one on whom any father would be permitted to make all sorts of wild and ambitions expectations; for the boy was already more fluent than his father at the English language, and he was even more decisively better at mathematics. But there was a little problem.

Now the problem at hand was a little thing that my friend wanted to prove: his son hadSokoto blood fully running round the mesh of arteries and veins in him. Snag was that he still was speaking his Hausa in recognizable Kaduna accent! That wouldn’t be okay. So the father’s concern, typical of a scientist’s (albeit for a different reason) was to prove that he could still bend the boy’s tongue to sound out a bit of the arabesque croak that had become standard for Sokoto Hausa. It would sound unimportant to someone else, but it made sense to my friend and he was bent on succeeding in his experimentation.

So much for my friend and the tradition he hoped to prove was a constant.

Yet this rigmarole is supposed to be about the incurability of HIV in an afflicted country. thing is that both science and traditions are often about sheer arrogance; in fact, they are nary utilitarian. Often, they are like some kind of Jay-Jay who once insisted on being allowed to enjoy the mastery of the art of football for just no purpose but to prove that wonderful things could be done with an inflated bag on an arguably wasted plot of farm reserved for some special grass. But that was Jay-Jay before people like Alberto Carlos (the Brazilian we almost employed as coach) told him that all great players once exhibited such craving for space for the sheer defence of irrelevant things. Jay-Jay had to be told and changed to play relevant utilitarian football.

Herein lies the catch: the incurability of HIV subsists in the misadventures of science and of traditions a la young Jay-Jay. True, leave scientist all by themselves and they would spent time and effort proving very strange and irrelevant things, which are often only matters for consumption amongst themselves. It is often that some ambitious politician recognizes the special ability of scientists to whom he gives an immediate assignment and exigent purpose.

Take the case of the Manhattan Project that produced the Bomb for America; that project was a call from a politician who thought the Bomb would hold for his nation a kind of national pride and power, and the success of the project was largely the result of putting to palpability what scientist Einstein had invented ostensibly to prove his genius to his rival peers. It is credibly reported that Einstein even argued that although the equation he had crafted predicted the capacity to release immense energy to such a bizarre extent, he didn’t think it could lead to the centrifuges in the hands of Iran. Nary! But a politician needed it and got scientists to make it for him.