Timothy Trengove-Jones CROSSFIRE
The clearest indication of the health of this democracy is to be found in discourse surrounding the HIV/Aids pandemic. President Thabo Mbeki has told Parliament, the country and the world that this government’s policies on HIV/Aids are “based on the thesis that HIV causes Aids”. He has also conceded that the government’s messages about the illness “may have resulted in confusion”. However, he immediately went on to wonder how “a virus [could] cause a syndrome”, undoing in one breathtaking sentence the progress we thought we’d just witnessed. The president’s remarks concluded a fortnight during which debate around HIV/Aids hit an all-time low in this country. We have been disgraced by a sickening display of evasion, misinformation and spin-doctoring, all of which stemmed from the highest reaches of the government. We are also given bad medicine with the president quoted as saying that “the notion that immune deficiency is only acquired from a single virus cannot be sustained”. Our citizens are paying triply for what Aids Law Project’s Mark Heyward called “devious and dishonest” statements. Firstly, the remarks carried in Time magazine caused further bewilderment around the world and dismay among Aids workers at home.
Secondly, while the government hides behind arguments of cost, hugely expensive advertisements are taken out to contain quite avoidable damage yet succeed only in multiplying the nonsense. And thirdly, rather than contain the chaos, the country’s Aids efforts are plunged into further crisis with all the quite literally incalculable loss of life this entails. The search for a scapegoat has led inexorably to the media. Looking for someone to blame for the “confusion” that – happily – we all now acknowledge, Yacoob Abba Omar of the Government Communication and Information Service asked: “Whose fault is [the controversy] then?” The pat response? The media, of course. “The primary difficulty,” according to Omar, is an ill-informed press. Likewise, the minister of health has accused the media of “misrepresenting” the facts and has called for a meeting with editors to discuss the issue. These claims are palpably dishonest. Blaming the press is the hackneyed resort of every oppressive and beleaguered regime and the current aspersions recall the apartheid era. If our press is to blame it is for being too tentative in its criticism of government bungling. There is a groundswell of pressure building against the government. This is to be welcomed. But it is happening for no reason other than that people are dying in greater and greater numbers because very little is being done. In Parliament last week the president said that he awaited the recommendations of his controversial Aids Advisory Panel, and that, “in the meantime there is an existing Aids programme and that is what we should respond to”. He also indicated that further research was required into Nevirapine and the matter of mother-to-child transmission and that the government couldn’t focus on 16% of illnesses at the expense of the other 84%. And, once more, he insisted on the crucial role played by poverty in the current crisis.
It has become standard government strategy to distort its critics’ position. Nobody has ever recommended the government focus on Aids to the exclusion of other illnesses. Rather, the suggestion is that a sound Aids policy will enhance health across the board. Once more, a specious call to equity clouds matters. But let us follow the president’s advice and respond to the existing programme. It is estimated that every month about 5E000 babies are born HIV-positive in South Africa. We have one of the highest rates of new infections in the world and one of the largest ratios of adults living with HIV/Aids. And we have an “existing programme” and we must await the outcome of further research. Research has already established that, as Glenda Gray of Chris Hani-Baragwanath hospital puts it: “There is an HIV vaccine for mother-to-child transmission and the women of South Africa are being denied this.”
Despite the escalating infection rates, the “Ministry of Health continues with its incoherent policies”, says Gray. Over the past nine months – the duration of the current fiasco – about 45E000 babies have been consigned to preventable death by this government’s Aids programme. The lives of the most vulnerable citizens, our unborn children, are being treated with contempt by our government. Mbeki and his loyal ministers stress – however confusedly – the role of poverty in HIV infection rates. It needs to be said that the national Aids plan of 1994 quite explicitly addressed this problem. It has never not been part of this country’s thinking. Furthermore, we must insist that South Africa is one of the richest countries in Africa. Why then are our infection rates so much higher than relatively poorer nations, and why is our campaign meeting with so little success? The truth is that the president’s personal and peculiar opinions are bedevilling things. One notes that while he admits that the government’s policies are based on the HIV-causes-Aids thesis, he refrains from saying this is his view. One notes that for nearly a year now, crucial interventions have been delayed while there are calls for more research or pleadings about poverty. It would appear that the president is the crucial stumbling block and, judged by his latest comments, his own views are out of line with “government thinking”. But not, it seems, with government practice. The president is not the minister of health, nor is he a medical scientist. It is a travesty of democratic government for preventable deaths to occur because of the intransigence of one very powerful and intellectually arrogant man. The existing Aids programme and the toadying to people in power, are a slap in the face to all those who fought against apartheid to bring dignity to the poor and dispossessed in this country. And they place our democracy in jeopardy. Timothy Trengove-Jones is a Wits academic and an Aids researcher