It is amazing how low some women stoop to drive luxury vehicles. The MECs for health for Mpumalanga and Northern Cape have blocked anti-retroviral drugs for those raped. But the case of Northern Cape MEC for Health, Elizabeth Dipuo Peters, is particularly reprehensible.
The province was the first, in Octber 1999, with direct permission from Premier Manne Dipico to administer anti-retrovirals to rape survivors and for mother-to-child treatment. The Western Cape followed and more recently Kwa Zulu-Natal has followed. KwaZulu-Natal now has the most progressive policies in the country with regard to rape.
If the national health department has put pressure on the Northern Cape to reverse its policy, it is a sign of what will happen to Western Cape policies on rape and mother-to-child transmission now that the ANC is in control. And this is despite the ANC-dominated Parliament Committee on the Status of Women recommending in a detailed and carefully researched report after two months of hearings in November, that anti-retrovirals should be given to rape survivors. The report was followed in December by the Law Commission making the same recommendation. No doubt those reports are going to be ignored by an executive that always wants the last word and parliamentarians who sit silent on back benches rather than show courage and responsibility to the people who voted them into power.
As for the citizens of this country: if the best we can do is another e-mail petition then we might as well all move to Zimbabwe. It will be what we deserve. Charlene Smith, Johannesburg