President tells party caucus that Western interests are seeking to discredit him and South Africa Howard Barrell President Thabo Mbeki believes the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is part of a conspiracy to promote the view that HIV causes Aids. Mbeki also thinks that the CIA is working covertly alongside the big US pharmaceutical manufacturers to undermine him because, by questioning the link between HIV and Aids, he is thought to pose a risk to the profits of drug companies making anti-retroviral treatments.
Mbeki fingered the CIA in his address to African National Congress MPs at a caucus meeting in Parliament in Cape Town on Thursday last week. Mbeki also told the ANC caucus that the fact that South Africa under him was emerging as a leader of attempts by the developing world to get a better deal in the international economic system was a threat to the US and other major Western powers. He said the propaganda being made against him because of his stance on HIV/Aids was a foretaste of attempts to undermine him and South Africa that were being mounted by those determined to defend the established world economic order. In what was described as a “rambling” address, Mbeki said that if one agreed that HIV caused Aids, it followed that the condition had to be treated by drugs and those drugs were produced by the big Western drug companies. The drug companies therefore needed HIV to cause Aids, so they promoted the thesis that HIV caused Aids, he said. Reports on his address to the caucus published at the weekend focused on Mbeki’s allegations against the big drug companies. The news that he had also made allegations at the caucus against the CIA reached the Mail & Guardian from ANC MPs last Friday. The M&G’s informants were outraged that Mbeki had used the closed-door caucus meeting again to undermine the generally held scientific view that HIV causes Aids – just eight days after he had told Parliament and the country that government policy was “based on the thesis that HIV causes Aids”. “We have a president who is arguing against his own government’s policy. And he talks like this after telling us he knows talking like this has caused confusion in the past and hurt the campaign against HIV/Aids,” one ANC MP commented. He said his advisers were trying to find out who was spreading the idea that he was “deranged”. These reports were clearly part of a campaign against him and his government. He appealed to MPs to join him in fighting off this campaign. The struggle he and the government were waging for a better economic deal for developing countries and against the propaganda being put out by the drug companies and, covertly, the CIA were all linked, he said. MPs should not be afraid to take on these powerful international forces, he added. Mbeki’s remarks last Thursday disrupted desperate attempts by government spin doctors – both inside South African and abroad – to lay to rest the HIV/Aids controversy in which the president has embroiled himself and to repair the battering Mbeki’s image has taken.
A number of interviews with leading overseas newspapers are understood to have been lined up for Mbeki in coming weeks. The image fightback was launched with a trip to London late last month by Essop Pahad, the Minister in the Presidency, and the office’s special adviser on media matters, former Cape Times editor Tony Heard. But, by late this week, the controversy was again raging, almost out of control, inside South Africa. The South African Medical and Dental Council, which represents three out of every four doctors in practice, also entered the fray. It said in a formal statement on Monday (October 2): “Perhaps [Mbeki] has not consulted enough, or has somehow undermined that consultation process. There is no merit in him confusing everyone about the causal relationship between HIV and Aids.” It added: “President Mbeki is wrong if he implies doubt about HIV causing Aids. The president is right if he is attempting to force us to consider more than just the virus and the administration of medicines on the issue of HIV/Aids. In conclusion, HIV does cause Aids.” On Tuesday Mbeki’s chief aide in the ANC presidency, Smuts Ngonyama, wrote an article, published byBusiness Day, which revisited the controversy in a way that was not at all helpful to the approach apparently being pursued by government spin doctors. Ngonyama’s article again highlighted views held by Mbeki that were clearly supposed now to recede into the background. The foreground message spin doctors have been trying to promote in recent weeks is taken from one sentence spoken by Mbeki in his long question-and-answer session with MPs on September 20. It is that “government policy is based on the thesis that HIV causes Aids”. On Wednesday the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) also raised the temperature of the controversy. It suggested criticisms voiced in the media were part of “a massive propaganda onslaught against the ANC, its president and its government”. The NEC added, in reference to Mbeki’s appointment of a special panel into scientific issues around HIV/Aids: “The NEC lends its full support to the initiatives of the government to support further scientific enquiry into this very complex pandemic and towards efforts to find some cure. “In this context we should refuse to surrender to populism, dogma, sales pitches of some pharmaceutical companies and their agents.”
Also on Wednesday, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, president of the Medical Research Council, told a meeting at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, in a clear reference to Mbeki, that South Africa could afford no more mixed messages and blunders in its fight against HIV/Aids. Great care had to be taken with “political and scientific choices” if South Africa was to avoid history recording that it collaborated in the “greatest genocide of our time”.
Makgoba added that when the small group of dissident scientists who challenge the causal link between HIV and Aids were gone, South Africa would still be facing “the explosive and unrelenting HIV/Aids epidemic”. On the same day Dr Robert Shell, a leading demographer attached to both Rhodes University and Princeton University in the US, used the conference of the Demographic Association of South Africa in Port Elizabeth to call for Mbeki’s resignation. “The ANC must find a way to get Mbeki to resign. As far as HIV researchers are concerned, we would like him to go,” said Shell.
Foreign diplomats based in South Africa have, meanwhile, been concerned at Mbeki’s evident inability thus far to put the controversy behind him. “But we don’t think he’s damaged goods yet,” one said this week. In his address to his caucus, Mbeki also spoke approvingly of a conference of about 60 dissident scientists held in Uganda last month, which said there was no scientific proof that HIV causes Aids and that HIV was merely a passenger virus. He said the HIV virus had never been isolated and said reports suggesting that Uganda had scored significant successes in the fight against Aids were untrue. Anti-retroviral drug therapies have been quite widely used in Uganda and President Yoweri Museveni has personally played a leading role in raising public awareness of how to avoid contracting the disease.