While the Treatment Action Campaign would be happy to meet Deputy President Jacob Zuma, it was concerned that a previous meeting with him had yielded no tangible results, a TAC representative said on Monday.
The SA National Aids Council (Sanac) said on Sunday that it had asked Zuma, its chairman, to initiate a process of engagement with TAC prior to a possible meeting of the full council with representatives of the organisation.
TAC’s Phologolo Ramothwala told Sapa: ”It would be a step in the right direction.”
But he added: ”At the end of last year we also met the deputy president to discuss access to treatment, and still nothing has happened.”
In its statement, Sanac said: ”The council noted with concern the developments around the Nedlac process and the misunderstandings of government’s participation in that process.”
Sanac was referring to TAC’s insistence that the government sign a framework agreement for a national HIV/Aids treatment and prevention plan which the lobby group says was agreed upon in the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) last year.
The government has denied that any agreement has been reached on a joint plan to fight HIV/Aids. TAC embarked on a civil disobedience campaign earlier this month
because, it claimed, government did not demonstrate urgency in making treatment available for HIV/Aids patients.
This came after the February 28 deadline which TAC chairman Zackie Achmat set for this purpose, passed without the government signing the Nedlac document.
The Congress of SA Trade Unions earlier described as ”distressing” the government’s denial that such an agreement existed, but later said there was a misunderstanding and that the document discussed at Nedlac did not yet have the status of an agreement.
Ramothwala said nothing had happened since the cabinet’s April 17 statement last year.
”In the statement they said they recognised the use of antiretrovirals as an urgent matter. Since then they have done nothing to support that statement,” he said.
”Even though we are happy to meet the deputy president, those are things the cabinet needs to look into.” – Sapa