“Brutus,” said Mark Anthony in that famously duplicitous speech, “is an honourable man.” And so we come to praise President Thabo Mbeki for the contributions he has made to the battle against HIV/Aids this week. Most immediately he has, by his controversial stance,
ensured a degree of worldwide publicity for the cause such as the organisers of this week’s international conference in Durban could scarcely have hoped. A major foe of any public health campaign is public apathy and even a killer plague can be reduced to yawns by the reiteration to which the more concerned are driven. The sight of such as a Constitutional Court judge, a head of state and eminent scientists publicly squabbling over the nature of a disease makes for a compelling and educative spectacle. Credit is also due to the president for the courage of
his lonely stand. It is, in a sense, reassuring to know that there is a hand on the tiller of the ship of state which will not be stampeded by demands for consensus in that international rat race dubbed the community of nations. His open and virulent prejudice against the pharmaceutical industry also has attractions in an age where the corporate power of the multinational drug companies threatens to outreach their accountability to a dangerous extent. There is even a certain charm in the thought of a head of state boyishly clinging to his cyber-board, hurtling through the night and Net in search of scientific verities with which to confound his highly paid professional advisers. Here at least there is a president to keep the experts on their toes. But all of these plaudits count for little in the greater
scale of things, on which the national interest is balanced. This has become glaringly apparent, not just through the exchanges on this week’s conference floor, but even more strikingly by virtue of the exchange of letters published at the weekend, between Mbeki and the leader of the opposition, Tony Leon. The correspondence, for those who missed it, turned
largely on a report issued by the Centers for Disease Control in America on the suitability of the anti- retroviral treatment, AZT, for rape victims. Mbeki uses it to justify his government’s failure to supply AZT to rape victims. He does so on the grounds that there is no evidence that AZT prevents transmission of the HIV virus and that anyway its toxicity is so high and the risk of transmission by rape so low that the treatment is not warranted. An analysis of the president’s letter by Leon, in response, points to a distortion of fact by way of contextual manipulation which, if used by a second- hand car salesman, would verge on the fraudulent. Even more worrying than this act of presidential misrepresentation, Mbeki goes on to use it as a platform for a diatribe on race of a kind with which the African National Congress has so regrettably become identified in the post-Mandela era. His specific attack on a single rape victim is forcefully answered by the victim herself in this edition and requires little more by way of comment. Taken together the performance of Mbeki in this latest act of the unfolding tragedy that is the HIV/Aids saga betrays an instinct for a perceived sectional interest which does not befit a national leader. It constitutes a betrayal of his own constituency, because of the high cost of the policy of denial in that very quarter. Anthony was of course being ironic in his representation of Brutus as an “honourable man”. It is with the same sense of irony that we set out to offer an accounting of presidential virtues. Get rid of Mallett There are few more shameful fates than for a Springbok rugby team to play so badly that they make 15 Englishmen look like urban Tarzans. Nor does it feel any better being thrashed by 15 Antipodean sheepshaggers, as we were last Saturday. But these are the depths to which our national team has plummeted. To understand this sad state of affairs in our rugby, we need look no further than coach Nick Mallett. He is to good man-management what Essop Pahad is to charm. Which is to say Mallett has succeeded not in building the confidence of many of our finest players but in shattering it. The prodigiously talented Gaffie Du Toit is a prime example. He is, now, barely a shadow of the player he was before Mallett ill-advisedly threw him in at the deep end and, after he’d had difficulty swimming, publicly humiliated him. Other players have met similar fates. This week we hear that Mallett has taken to calling the Springbok tight five a bunch of pansies in public. Has the man not heard of doing the hard talking in private, defending the team’s dignity in public and telling the sports journalists to make do with his platitudes? If he has, he has apparently sacrificed that understanding in his own defence. For Mallett has discovered that it is easier publicly to blame the team or some individuals in it for any shortcomings they may exhibit – evidently in the hope of deflecting responsibility from himself – than it is to stand four- square with them, to defend them and seek to build them up. At the same time, he seems to have retained a number of players in the team for reasons other than their ability to play rugby. Get rid of Mallett. Oh yes, and bring back Chester!