" I married my wife as a Virgin " - Gov Ben Ayade

Senator Ben Ayade, the Cross River State governor has said that he married his wife as a virgin which is the pride of Africans who value the virtues of virginity and chastity.

Senator Ayade who made the disclosure in Calabar (today) Thursday while delivering a lecture on the HIV/AIDS scourge to mark the 2016 World Aids Day awareness walk, stated that the greatest gift any woman can possibly hand to her husband is to present her body as virgin to him.

“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 stated that young people easily give in to sex for financial inducement, peer pressure and influence of international movies and believe that with the use of condoms they are secured from getting infected with HIV which in most cases is not full proof protection against the pandemic.

“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”.

He said the best protection against infection is total abstinence and test before marriage by couples and staying faithful to each other because the virus has the capacity to live in the body of an infected person for 25 years in some cases before the viral load overwhelms the body.

“During such a time, a person with the virus becomes an effective carrier of the diseases which gives him the chance to infect others during unprotected sex”.

Dr. Rose Nyambi, the Director General of the State Action Committee Against AIDS, SACA, said the state has a total of 164,267 persons living with the virus. Among them 108,000 females and 61,827 males.

“It may interest you to know that SACA has been housing the Network of People Living with HIV. We have a directory of 80 support groups of people living with the virus with a total of 164,267 comprising of 103,000 females and 61,827 males and out of this number, 25,907 are on Anti Retro-viral Therapy, ART”.

She called for the scaling up of more HIV counseling and testing services by getting everyone in the state to know his or her HIV status if the state must achieve the global vision of ensuring that 90% of people know their status so that those who test positive are placed on treatment.