Old lefties, illiterate township dwellers and a marathon runner are the driving force behind the Treatment Action Campaign
Belinda Beresford
Part of the heart of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) will be pounding its way through the London marathon on Sunday.
Ploughing through three-and-a-half hours of pain will be TAC deputy head Mark Heywood, his purple and white “HIV-Positive” T-shirt begging to be filmed by a roaming television camera.
In South Africa the tense and wiry Heywood, together with the ironic and acerbic Zackie Achmat, are, for many within the government, possibly the least popular people in the country.
In just over three years since its inception, the TAC has managed repeatedly to humiliate the government in a series of media-friendly court cases and protests over access to treatment for HIV-positive people.
It has also managed to rub the nose of the world in the less-than-fragrant truth about the lack of health care for poor people in developing countries. Not to mention induce a degree of twitchiness among some of the world’s most powerful multinationals the pharmaceutical companies by highlighting the inequities in how international intellectual property rights are applied.
Sharon Ekambaram, a former executive member of the TAC, who has been involved in the NGO sector for more than 15 years, says the TAC “is an organisation that acts as if there is no tomorrow”.
“People are not trying to discuss their mission, get a collective response to strategy, or worry about PC questions. The organisation thinks on its feet. There is no fixed, single strategic plan, it’s just a question of how are we going to help poor people get access to treatment. They don’t need consensus, they don’t need to agree, it’s just ‘we will go forward whether you are with us or not’.”
To the world the TAC is the double headed “MarkandZackie”, and this is largely true behind the scenes.
One person within the Aids world who knows them both intimately describes them as complementary and very close. The combative Achmat, who once famously made the head of the Department of Health’s Aids directorate, Nono Simelela, cry publicly, is the person who comes up with the 4am ideas.
Heywood is the one who gets the 4.15am phone call and then spends the rest of the night working out how to put the ideas into action.
To do this he has the well-oiled, almost fanatical team of 14 full-time TAC staff members. Then there are the several thousand volunteers and TAC members, who are the engine of the campaign. They mobilise demonstrations, giving talks across the country, stepping into the spotlight when necessary, and doing their best to help the desperate people who often turn up at the door looking for food, money, medicines, any kind of help.
In addition there is also a growing pool of outside well-wishers. The latter group includes some of the most respected minds in the country, who tend to find themselves donating their time and expertise free.
Others, like Nathan Geffen, volunteered for four hours a week and ended up working full-time and using his skills as a computer science lecturer to create and maintain the TAC’s website and mailing lists.
Crucial to the TAC’s success are its roots in the anti-apartheid movement. Many of the people working for the organisation are old lefties, veterans of the struggle, with accompanying credibility that has not been diluted by conspicuous personal financial prosperity. These are people who learned well the skills of mass mobilisation, how to feed and profit from the media and how to use the law to its utmost.
The TAC can ensure that a nicely photogenic crowd, largely clad in one or other version of the HIV-positive T-shirts, is protesting at every step of the organisation’s campaign. Reporters can get hold of a spokesperson from the TAC ahead of deadline, and when they do the response is articulate and correctly packaged for that particular medium.
Such skills could be regarded as spin doctoring. But winning hearts and minds to the cause was a significant factor in the fight against apartheid, and the TAC is not about to let go of a winning strategy.
The photogenic protesters will be people infected with HIV or those caring for people with the virus. Often they include nurses, doctors and carers many of the court cases over nevirapine to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV have been attended by medical personnel in their lunch hour or after work.
Heywood attributes part of the TAC’s power to its appeal across society.
“The TAC has touched a chord in society, with ordinary people who usually don’t get involved. They know they have to do something.”
The TAC was conceived in late 1998 by Achmat, as a campaigning arm of the National Association of People Living With Aids. It soon outgrew its parent and there are now tensions between the two organisations. There are still close links between the Aids Law Project (ALP) at the University of the Witwatersrand and the TAC. Heywood now heads the ALP, which provides much of the legal firepower for the TAC. In this it is helped by others such as advocate Gilbert Marcus, and the head of the Constitutional Litigation Centre at the Legal Resources Centre, Geoff Budlender. The Aids Consortium, a grouping of NGOs, is also a close partner of the TAC.
Another aspect of the TAC that must have some senior figures in government grinding their teeth, is the organisation’s close links with trade union bodies such as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Despite the pressure this puts on its alliance with the African National Congress and on leading members, Cosatu has stayed faithful to its relationship with TAC.
The Aids organisation has extensive international support from donor funding to informal and formal links with other NGOs such as Oxfam, the Consumer Project of Technology, Mdcins sans Frontires, and Act-Up. It does not receive money or any other form of payment from pharmaceutical companies nor do its members get special prices on medicines from the drug companies.
Judge Edwin Cameron, one of the backroom supporters of the TAC, helped raise the profile of the Aids movement generally by publicly revealing his HIV-positive status and the fact that he is alive because he can afford to pay for anti-retroviral treatment.
He likens the TAC to the End Conscription Campaign, another body that managed to unite people from disparate ideologies and backgrounds by focusing on a single issue. Similarly Cameron points out that the End Conscription Campaign “concentrated on legal challenge. We fought in every court in the country.”
Anti-apartheid groups, Cameron says, were driven by a “sense of moral outrage born from the non-use or misuse of government power. In my view the greatest moral challenge today is Aids, and the TAC takes up that challenge.”
He also points out that the TAC has been moulded by the government. “The government’s stance on the nature and treatment of HIV has defied understanding or belief. Without it, the TAC would have been very different, and would not have received the support it has.”
A silent but critical partner for the TAC is South Africa’s Constitution. The Aids organisation has wielded this document and the rights it enshrines but not always defines with singular success.
Some, including TAC Gauteng co-ordinator Pholokgolo Ramothwala, say that the TAC in turn is starting to make the Constitution a living experience for South Africans by taking it down to the grassroots.
“I didn’t realise that the Constitution is so important until now. For me and many of my colleagues, we now realise that this is the law protecting South Africans.”