The governor of Cross River state, Ben Ayade says young people must be encouraged to abstain from sexual intercourse till they get married while revealing that he met his wife as a virgin when he married her.
Ayade says abstinence and faithfulness are the only ways to end the HIV scourge in Nigeria.
Speaking on Thursday at the commemoration of the 2016 World AIDS Day celebration in Calabar, Ayade said it’s high time young people were taught that sex before marriage is a taboo in the African culture.
He said the greatest gift any woman could possibly hand to her husband was to present her body as a virgin to him.
In his words, Ayade said, “I should say to the teenagers here today that when somebody leads you to the altar, at the end of that day he should be glad to say I married my wife a virgin.”
The governor further said young people easily gave in to sex due to financial inducement, peer pressure and influence of international movies and believed that with the use of condom they were secure from HIV, which in most cases was not full-proof protection against the pandemic.
According to the governor, “when people use condom, they think they are safe which is the major cause of infection because evidence abound that the use of condom does not provide total protection against HIV/AIDS since the condom itself has small holes that are 0.05 wider than microbes, which makes HIV virus to pass successfully.”
Ayade further noted that his government would do everything within its power to curtail the spread of the virus in Cross River.
Dr Rose Nyambi, the Director General of the State Action Committee Against AIDS, SACA, said the state had 164,267 persons (108,000 females; 61,827 males) living positively with the virus.