AFP, Cape Town | Friday
A MAJOR obstacle in the country’s economic growth, besides unemployment, is HIV and Aids, South African Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni said.
Speaking at a graduation ceremony at the University of the North at Turfloop, Mboweni said that despite the epidemic, South Africa had the best chance of all the countries in Africa of developing a “world-class competitive economy as we enter the next millennium”.
He said about 45% of people in the low-income communities either believed that there was a cure for Aids or that it was not a fatal disease, he said.
Mboweni said about 4,2-million people in South Africa had been infected with HIV and that every day, between 1500 to 1700 people in the country were infected.
Between 1997 and 1998, infection rates among 15 to 19 year olds rose by a 65%.
Meanwhile, former South African president Nelson Mandela has broken ranks with his increasingly isolated successor, Thabo Mbeki, declaring in an interview that he believes HIV to be the cause of Aids.
The 82-year-old Mandela, in his first public censure of Mbeki since handing over the presidency in June last year, said he believed Mbeki “now and again must come under severe criticism,” despite doing “very well” as president.
The former president said he shared the “dominant opinion that prevails throughout the world” that HIV is the cause of Aids, adding that he would only be persuaded otherwise if new scientific research showed “conclusively that that view is wrong.”
Mandela, who remains immensely popular in retirement, warned that public figures should not dally with theories that might prove to have no scientific basis, wagging a finger at Mbeki’s flirtation with Aids dissidents.
“I would like to be careful because for people in our position, when you take a stand, you might find that established principles are undermined, sometimes without scientific backing,” he said.
Mbeki provoked an outcry by saying he believed HIV to be but one of the causes of Aids, and on September 20, noting that Aids stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, told parliament flatly: “A virus cannot cause a syndrome.”