Kenya’s First Lady decries use of condoms

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Kenyan First Lady Lucy Kibaki risked the wrath of anti-AIDS campaigners by advising young people against using condoms, saying they should practice abstinence instead.

“Those still in school and colleges have no business having access to condoms,” Lucy Kibaki said in a speech carried on the government’s Web site on Friday. “I am not in favour of condoms.”

Kenya has seen a decline in the number of HIV/AIDS cases in the past decade. In the late 1990s, 10 percent of the population was infected but by 2003, that number had dropped to 7 percent.

Many AIDS experts attribute such success in part to wider use of condoms.

But some staunch Christians, as well as prominent Africans including Ugandan First Lady Janet Museveni, have promoted abstinence over condom use as the best way to fight AIDS.

“Sex is not for the youth,” Kibaki was quoted as saying by a local newspaper in its report on the speech given on Thursday night at a girls’ school.

Many activists working to combat the disease’s deadly impact across Africa, where millions have died from the pandemic, say views like those of Kibaki and Museveni ignore the reality that most people will not stop having sex.

Kibaki, who is a member of the African First Ladies Against HIV/AIDS, has courted controversy throughout her husband’s tenure since 2002.

In 2005, she stormed into a newsroom and accused reporters of telling lies about her, while last month she tore into one of her husband’s political foes for his “persistent and unwarranted” attacks on the president.

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