A crowd of about 150 members of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) demonstrated noisily outside the Department of Health in Struben Street, Pretoria, on Thursday as part of the organisation’s civil disobedience campaign, police said.
Superintendent Morne van Wyk said police monitored the situation and opened a docket under the Gatherings Act because no permission was applied for to hold the demonstration.
No crowd control action was required.
Some 20 TAC members embarked on a sit-in in the Department of Trade and Industry’s regional office in Adderley Street, Cape Town, while about 200 more who were shut out, sang and danced outside.
Police monitored the protest but there were no disturbances and the department said no charges would be laid against the demonstrators inside the building, who handed over a memorandum addressed to Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
TAC spokesperson Nathan Geffen said: ”We want to address Alec Erwin because his department has failed to meet its obligation to bring down the excessive price of medicines.
”This could have been done by issuing licences for the importation and production of generic antiretrovirals (ARVs). We gave Alastair Ruiters, the director-general, a memorandum in 2001 and there has been absolutely no movement, no response,” Geffen said.
He said the TAC welcomed moves to develop local capacity for producing Aids drugs, but use should be made in the meantime of existing capacity in the private generic sector.
”We’ve had too many promises from government in the past to take them at their word at this point,” he said.
Hundreds of TAC activists gathered peacefully at Gugu Dlamini Park in Durban, and by late afternoon had dispersed without incident.
TAC provincial spokesperson Desmond Mpofu said: ”We decided to hold the protest gathering without police permission as part of our civil disobedience campaign. The government must authorise the channelling of money from the Global Aid Fund to provinces as soon as possible.”
Twelve members of the National Association of People Living With HIV-Aids (Napwa) appeared briefly in the Midrand Magistrate’s Court on Thursday and were released on warning to reappear on May 15 to answer charges of trespassing.
Captain Martin Hulk said the 12 were arrested on Tuesday when they gathered at the head office of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PMA) at Thornhill Office Park, Midrand, shortly after 53 other Napwa members were arrested when protesting at the same office park.
Since there was no room for them at Midrand the 53 spent Tuesday night in the cells at Kempton Park police station before appearing in the Randburg Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday charged with trespass, malicious damage to property and organising an illegal gathering.
They were all released on their own recognizances while investigations continued into allegations that a car belonging to a PMA employee was damaged, Hulk said.
Napwa director Nkunuleko Nxesi said a delegation met representatives of the PMA at Midrand on Thursday to put Napwa’s point of view.
”The meeting was inconclusive,” he said, ”But the PMA said they would sound out individual manufacturers and further meetings with them are in the pipeline.”
”We want the manufacturers to reduce the prices of life-saving drugs, especially ARVs, so that they are affordable to the poor and even free to the unemployed and desperately disadvantaged,” Nxesi said.
”Unless this is done Napwa will have no choice but to call for a nationwide boycott of the manufacturers’ other products, cosmetics, pain relievers and so on,” he said.
The average cost of ARVs is between R1 000 and R1 500 a month and there are an estimated 5,5-million South Africans living with HIV/Aids.
”Our argument is not at all political. We have no quarrel with the government, only with the manufacturers,” Nxesi said.
Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) spokesperson Mark Hayward said: ”The TAC fully supports the demonstrations by Napwa and, yes, the manufacturers could provide the same drugs for an average R300 a month instead of R1500. But they won’t because then their hugely profitable European and American markets would also call for a similar reduction and they don’t want that.”
”Where we differ from Napwa is that whatever the cost of the drugs we believe it needs a change in government’s present policy to help distribute them, to make them available at clinics and put in place the educational infrastructure to show people how to use these volatile substances, to make them aware of side effects and so on,” Hayward said. – Sapa