Gov Ben Ayade of Cross River State said,on Thursday that he wedded his better half as a virgin, which is the pride of Africans, who esteem the ideals of celibacy.
Ayade, who made the exposure in Calabar, while conveying an address on the HIV/AIDS scourge to check the 2016 World Aids Day, said the best blessing any lady could hand to her significant other was to present her body as a virgin to him.
He said:
“I ought to state to the young people here today that when some individual leads you to the sacrificial table, toward the end of that day he ought to be happy to state I wedded my significant other a virgin.”
The governor stated that 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.”
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.