Peter Dickson
A week after the government unveiled its controversial National Aids Council (NAC), Aids activists around South Africa have united online to form an alternative watchdog body, the Shadow National Aids Council (SNAC).
“Every move, statement and omission will be monitored by SNAC,” outspoken Eastern Cape health official Dr Costa Gazi announced this week, “because we don’t believe the NAC has a future or can contribute to what is no longer a battle but an outright war on Aids.”
Gazi says the SNAC’s first job will be to “investigate” little-known American Dr Mark Ottenweiler, a Christian fundamentalist, who represents the crucial NGO sector on the NAC.
Gazi, head of public health at Mdantsane’s Cecilia Makiwane hospital and national health secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress, hit the headlines last April when he defied Bisho’s gagging order on public servants issuing press statements and called for manslaughter charges against former minister of health Nkosazana Zuma for her refusal to provide the commercially available anti- retroviral drug AZT to pregnant women.
Department of Health officials hauled Gazi before a disciplinary committee in December, finding him guilty of bringing Zuma into disrepute and recommending he be reprimanded. Gazi was this week ordered to pay a R1E000 fine, half of which is suspended for six months on condition there is no recurrence of the offence. Gazi plans to appeal, and says the Freedom of Expression Institute is prepared to pay his legal bill.
Gazi, who decided to form a shadow council in consultation with other activists meeting in Durban last week, says the NAC is a powerless body that lacks dynamism and expert input and is a “useless initiative on a par with the Sarafina II and Virodene sagas”.
“It should have been a war council with a budget and resources at its fingertips,” says Gazi.
Gazi says a website is under construction and that he and other activists, networking via e-mail and the Internet, are drawing up a constitution for the shadow council. At present an online discussion group, the SNAC will comprise Aids activists, organisations and researchers excluded from the NAC “speaking from the shadows”. They include “government and ANC people who are reluctant to speak out for fear of being seen as disloyal”.