OWN CORRESPONDENT and ELLIS MNYANDU, Johannesburg | Tuesday
SOUTH Africa’s biggest labour federation, Cosatu, has launched a stinging attack on President Thabo Mbeki’s economic policies and urged him to rethink his controversial stand on HIV/AIDS.
In a tough speech to the annual meeting of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), its leader Willie Madisha said the government’s policies on privatisation had failed and challenged the president to acknowledge that the HIV virus causes AIDS.
Madisha called for a review of reforms set out in the government’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR). The strategy – praised in business circles – focuses on boosting growth by lowering inflation, interest rates, the budget deficit and government spending.
”GEAR has failed to realise most of its targets and objectives,” he said, adding that GEAR’s failure was the result of centralised policy-making by Mbeki’s administration.
Madisha said Cosatu wanted a rethink on the privatisation of state enterprises, saying it limited services to the poor and threatened jobs, but saved his harshest criticism for the government’s AIDS policy, saying Mbeki was wasting time on scientific speculation and hindering the fight against the disease.
Mbeki sat stony-faced throughout Madisha’s speech and he avoided the issue when he addressed the congress.
In his speech Mbeki sought to deflect Cosatu and the SACP’s anger with the GEAR strategy, and made only a passing reference to AIDS when he listed diseases afflicting South Africans. Instead, he concentrated on slamming the ”beneficiaries of our racist past” for the rift in the alliance, and urged it to ”intensify the struggle against racism”.
The 1.8 million-strong Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP) are alliance partners with Mbeki’s ruling African National Congress (ANC).
Mbeki’s policies on HIV/AIDS, which afflicts an estimated 10% of South Africa’s 43 million population, have been controversial since he cited personal Internet research last year questioning the predominant view that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus.
But Madisha said Mbeki should spend time finding urgent ways of providing cheap medicines to AIDS sufferers. – Reuters