Loose cannon Robert Kirby
Intellectual colossus or not, Mr Thabo Mbeki doesn’t always make sense. Last Sunday, for example, he was up on his election soapbox and, to everyone’s amazement, he was quite vehement when he put the blame squarely on the Nats for having unilaterally decided to stop hanging people. “It was not the ANC who lifted the death penalty,” thundered a clearly quite miffed Mbeki. “It was De Klerk.”
Was it the excitement of the moment, I wondered, or merely a slip of an over- heating tongue? For it simply doesn’t make a lot of political sense for someone like Thabo Mbeki to award righteous credit marks to his most despised opponents – especially so close to election time. Certainly not when it comes to impassioned issues like the death penalty. Hanging people for fun is one of the legacies of apartheid that occupies a permanent niche in the ANC’s wall of moral contempt.
So why was Mr Mbeki denying his party had anything to do with sealing off the gallows? I believe that in the thrill of the electioneering moment he just got a bit confused about which version of the death penalty the ANC is supposed to be opposed to. This because it has recently become quite obvious that it’s not legalised execution, itself, that the ANC is against. It’s a question of category.
Just so long as it’s only innocent babies being killed off and not any invaluable criminals, the ANC is quite clearly in favour of the death penalty. This is because withholding free anti-retroviral treatment from HIV-infected pregnant women, in effect condemns a goodly proportion of their babies to death. Of the babies who would contract the HIV during birth, some 50% can be saved.
Withholding drug treatment is a very efficient death penalty, too. Even in the grimmest days of apartheid something less than 10% of those sentenced to death ever actually got hanged. Whatsmore, having a noose tightened around your neck and being dropped through a hole in the floor is an infinitely quicker, a more merciful death than the pitiful coughing and suffocating one which awaits HIV-positive babies once they’ve completed their statutory three or four years of sickly life.
In defence of the ANC’s decision to allow thousands upon thousands of babies to contract a fatal disease, a welter of intriguing arguments have been forwarded by ANC thinkers. None more intriguing though than those which regularly purl from Dr Nkosazana Zuma, Minister of Health and Musicals in the ANC Cabinet. It’s quite hard to pin down which of Zuma’s intriguing arguments will have become current by the time this column is printed – she frequently shuffles them. So let’s just say that among her many justifications for not supplying free drug therapy to HIV-positive pregnant mothers is that it would be far too expensive. Or, when in doubt, hang a high price-tag on it?
Scientific minds – admittedly not of the unbridled sweep of Dr Zuma’s – have cautiously pointed out that the actual cost of this drug regimen would be about R380 per mother – less than the average cost of a single day’s stay in a state hospital. (The Sarafina II budget would have saved a mere 37 000.) Moreover, inhibiting the chance of a baby’s HIV infection at birth would be far cheaper than having to treat that baby during the inevitable and miserable death which follows infection. (So as not to be unnecessarily sentimental about this, let’s specifically exclude the misery of the baby’s parents who have to watch their child die.)
But Nkosazana was ready for that sort of offside flag. Her latest contention is that it hasn’t been proven to her satisfaction that the above drug therapy is really effective in reducing maternal HIV transmission rates. In other words why throw out expensive lifebelts when you know only 50% of them will save a drowning? Most of the lesser planets in the medical firmament heartily disagree with her but theirs are only passing light.
To another recent contradiction by Dr Zuma was added the force of Mr Mbeki’s countersignature. This was when they both blamed the whole thing on the drug company, Glaxo, for not sufficiently reducing the price of the HIV drugs. A 70% reduction was ludicrously inadequate.
All of which leaves only one question to be answered. Never mind whether the drug- therapy is effective or not, what is a reasonable tariff? What is the ANC’s top bid for saving an individual human life?