NO blows BARRED
Sipho Seepe
The anti-racism conference has offered an opportunity for the world to grapple with practical measures to ensure the eradication of all forms of discrimination and accompanying injustices everywhere in the world. This should, as United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan puts it, “help to free the present and the future from the shackles of the past … and past wrongs must not distract us from present evils”.
The greatest present evil is the HIV/Aids pandemic. The UN Special Session on HIV/Aids noted that the epidemic “constitutes a global emergency and one of the most formidable challenges to human life and dignity; as well as to the effective enjoyment of human rights, which undermines social and economic development throughout the world”.
Over the past two decades it has killed almost 22-million people. Last year alone three million people died. It has left 13-million children orphaned. Of the more than 36-million people with HIV/Aids, 75% are in sub-Saharan Africa.
The South African government’s response to this epidemic is scandalous. Instead of marshalling all available material and intellectual resources to address the epidemic, President Thabo Mbeki pursues the discredited idea that “HIV does not cause Aids”. His pseudo-intellectual ambitions have proved to be nothing more than a potpourri of misrepresentations, denials, half-truths, distortions and the misreading of text, all spiced with frightening intellectual dishonesty. While the political/ scientific furore continues, cemeteries are running out of space.
Consistent with his apparent disdain for expertise, Mbeki constituted a National Aids Council whose claim to notoriety is having excluded Aids medical experts, researchers and NGOs working with People Living with Aids.
The council has since been eclipsed by what has become the presidential one-man show. Mbeki’s propensity to ignore conventional wisdom is reminiscent of the apartheid government.
So too is the government’s display of irresponsible aloofness and callousness to human suffering. Nothing epitomises this attitude more than Mbeki’s treatment of the late Nkosi Johnson. Deeply insecure and anxious about being upstaged at an Aids conference last year, the president could not bring himself to stay and join the world in listening to the boy for 10 minutes.
Before he died, Johnson had become the face of Aids the world over. Yet despite, or to spite, societal expectations and the expressed wish of Nkosi himself, Mbeki could not bring himself to visit the frail little boy. Even on the day of his funeral he could not find the generosity to pay his respects.
This callousness is also reflected in the purchase of the R600-million presidential jet. This money could have been used to purchase the desperately needed anti-retroviral drugs to prevent mother-to-child transmissions. Instead the president’s comfortable travelling arrangements take precedence over saving babies’ lives.
One would expect a government that purports to put “people first” would ensure that all forms of transmission are prevented. While believing poverty to be the main cause of HIV/Aids, the Mbeki government has committed R50-billion to arms procurement, which translates to more than 80 times the additional amount earmarked to fight the epidemic. Yet on the African continent Aids kills more than five times the number dying in wars and the epidemic has not yet peaked.
Inevitably, Mbeki’s travels abroad are overshadowed by controversy relating to his eccentric ideas on HIV/Aids. The Observer described him as “the president who lets babies die in pain [and] who has declared himself a medical expert who understood his country’s Aids epidemic better than global authorities”; the Sunday Times of London called him an “enemy of the people”.
Aside from undermining scientific research and good strategies that have a proven record of effectiveness, the government’s intransigence erodes investor confidence in the country.
Closer to home, the Congress of South African Trade Unions argued that the government’s unwillingness to provide anti-retroviral drugs, particularly to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and its denial of treatment for the millions of victims is tantamount to condemning HIV/Aids patients to an early death.
If we continue on this erroneous path, then, as Medical Research Council president Malegapuru Makgoba has put it: “History may judge us, the present Africans, to have collaborated in the greatest genocide of our time by the types of choices political or scientific we make in relation to this HIV/Aids epidemic.”
Unfortunately, developments in this country indicate that many in the ruling elite have been rewarded handsomely for not challenging Mbeki and his fatally misguided views.
We must not be hoodwinked by pious rhetoric that is not matched by actions or the prioritisation of people’s lives. Those who fought valiantly for democracy are not immune to betraying and sacrificing the masses on the altar of political expediency and power.
With its policies the Mbeki government will preside over the graves of millions of Africans. The same world outrage against the apartheid government should prevail over those who knowingly fail to protect the lives of their people against the disease. As Charlene Smith puts it in her just-published book Proud of Me (Penguin): “Tell that to Mbeki, the chief undertaker.”