Johannesburg | Sunday
THE National Association of People Living With HIV/ Aids (Napwa) on Saturday attacked politicians and others who were exploiting HIV/Aids and people living with the disease to promote their own agendas.
”We appeal to all populists and power mongers not to see the HIV/Aids field as the best ladder to climb towards achieving their ill-bred ambitions and goals,” said Napwa national director Nkululeko Nxesi in a statement.
He said HIV/Aids posed a major threat to South Africa and had to be approached in an apolitical manner as the pandemic ran across political divisions.
”As we approach the next elections, most, if not all political parties are going to pledge their solidarity with people living with HIV/Aids and also voice out their engagement in the fight against HIV/Aids. We will be promised all sorts of HIV/Aids reduction activities, programs and campaigns…,” Nxesi said.
”We view the politicising of HIV/Aids issue as a criminal offence because the rights of people living with HIV/Aids are always infringed and also our hopes are raised to the highest levels but when it comes to fulfilment of the promises, leaders beat about the bush seeking any available obstacle to the delivery of promises.”
He said it was pathetic that some politicians could be as irresponsible as to make jokes about other leaders whom they claimed were ill informed on the issue.
Nxesi also lamented the emergence of, what he called fly-by-night businesses, and so-called non-governmental organisations and community based organisations that were out to make a ”fast buck” off the back of the pandemic.
”Some people see HIV/Aids as a business venture, hence these days you are likely you hear statements such as, ‘HIV/Aids is a good business and if you want to make it in the corporate world just engage yourself in an HIV/Aids-related field.”’
Nxesi complained that no system currently existed to monitor the output of organisations in the field.
”These NGO’s are funded by there is no current system in place for monitoring them. Most have very nice-sounding programs but do they implement those?”
His comments followed a strongly-worded statement by Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane that the government was sinning against God and the people of South Africa by denying life-saving medication to mothers and children facing the threat of HIV/Aids.
In a toughly-worded speech prepared for delivery at the opening of new premises for an HIV research unit at Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital, Ndungane said government was accountable to God.
”When government stands in the way of our right to life, then government has overstepped its boundaries,” he said.
The continuing policy of silence and denial, ”which withholds life itself, is unacceptable,” he said.
The government has come under fire for refusing to administer anti-retroviral drugs to rape victims reporting to state health facilities.
It has also been challenged over its reluctance to provide the same drugs to HIV-positive mothers, to reduce the possibility of transmission to their children during birth.
Calling for leadership that could be trusted and supported, Ndungane said however he had been encouraged by a recent statement by President Thabo Mbeki that government had a comprehensive Aids policy ”premised on the fact that HIV causes Aids”.
Government representative are on record as saying Aids policy is based on the ”premise”, rather than ”fact”, that HIV causes Aids.
The Anglican leader said incidents such as the recent wrangle over the administration of anti-retroviral drugs to raped Northern Cape Baby Tshepang made him fear that ”we are frozen in the headlights of bureaucratic stubbornness”.
Both Nxesi and Ndungane were speaking in the same week a second province decided to break with national and African National Congress policy on the issue, and make the anti-retroviral drug Nevirapine widely available to HIV-positive pregnant mothers in the province’s state hospitals.
A similar programme already exists in the Western Cape. – Sapa