For the last two days, major television stations and newspapers here are giving more attention to countries President George W. Bush is visiting in Africa.
It is good that Americans are praising Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni for managing to reduce the infection rate of HIV/Aids.
However, some cable television stations are going far in associating Uganda with Aids. For two days now, ABC TV, for instance, is showing pictures of boneless patients in hospital wards suffering from Aids.
ABC�s evening �Nightline� programme on Tuesday devoted most of its time to Uganda, showing among others, heaps of coffins ready for sale in some Kampala locations. Again on Wednesday, when ABC�s �World News Tonight� mentioned something about Bush�s visit to Uganda, pictures of coffin-making workshops in Kampala accompanied the story.
As a result, the impression some Americans here are getting is not Uganda being successful in combating Aids, but people continuing to die from the disease in big numbers. To them, the heaps of coffins shown are all bought immediately. Unknown to them, many of those coffins remain in store for weeks, if not months, unsold.
Besides, malaria could be killing more people than Aids in Uganda, just as diabetes and heart attack are the leading killers in America. Statistics here show that a total of 647 people were murdered in Chicago alone during the year 2002. I doubt whether even a quarter of those murders can occur in Kampala in a single year.
This shows that every nation has its own problems.
It is unfair of foreigners to associate Uganda with coffins. May be coffin makers are also to blame for parading their products on roadsides.
Robert Mugagga,
Chicago - USA.
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