/ 1 August 2003

Another bouquet for our tourist attractions

Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s inspiring announcement last week about a herbal remedy for Aids-related diseases was yet further proof of our health department’s imaginative approach to crisis.

Wherever he was last week in his global peregrinations, Thabo Mbeki must have been well pleased to hear of Minister Manto’s announcement. Everything she does or says about HIV/Aids seems to manifest his misgivings about the unholy fuss that’s been made about the plague.

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Mbeki has every reason to feel vindicated. When Minister Manto added her hearty endorsement to the Aids-conquering properties of a salad of garlic, onions, olive oil and the African potato, it was clear she was dispatching numerous birds with the same stone. At 600 Aids deaths a day it is hardly to be expected she would take things lightly. Her enthusiasm for the curative salad was almost as infectious as the very virus that quite a few in her department still regard as little more than a figment of scientific imagination.

There is now hope that self-serving protest organisations like the Treatment Action Campaign will show humility and acknowledge the brilliance and foresight of the minister. We may also hope that avaricious international drug companies don’t try to steal and market the simple recipe as their own. Americans are like that.

What Minister Manto’s continuing and dynamic fight against HIV/Aids suggests is that the South African health department could itself be marketed as a source of valuable foreign currency. So-called ‘niche-market” tourists are willing to pay goodly amounts to travel to and inspect the sites of history’s myriad battles, the killing fields of human tragedies. You’ll find hosts of them wandering gloomily around Rorke’s Drift, Spioenkop, the preserved trenches of World War II in France and Belgium, sites of the American Civil War, everywhere from ancient to modern times where lives have been squandered in the cause of political envy and profit. Such tourists home in on the graves of those sacrificed to mankind’s furies. There is a horrible fascination with human misfortune.

So why isn’t our tourist department marketing our health department as both a past and a flourishing calamity? Think what fun it could be for ‘disaster tourists” to inspect a well-laid-out exhibition gallery of, say, the brilliant Sarafina 2 saga. Visitors could be transported in the actual R1,5-million luxury bus bought to transport the cast of the original show. Groups of street children could easily be trained to perform extracts from the show. Mbongeni Ngema could flog recordings of the show he made in the fabulous Sarafina sound studio that was set up in his home.

Elsewhere a static display could tell the inspiring story of Virodene, a drug developed with Cabinet-approved research. There are few radical interventional approaches to the Aids scourge that have been bold enough to include battery acid and industrial solvent in their formulas.

Another part of the itinerary could be a visit to the R45 000 state-of-the-art personal lavatory installed in the Union Buildings for the sole use of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma when she was first appointed as health minister. This could be followed by a tour of the Eastern Province rural areas where huge research has been conducted in the running of hospitals and clinics without recourse to expensive extras such as running water and electricity. Tourists could take part in the daily ‘Hunt-the-Disprin” competitions.

And what about a Nevirapine Hall? If ever there were a conflict site worth revisiting it is the still-smoking theatre of the long and hideously expensive defensive action, fought courageously by the government health department against being forced to provide this anti-retroviral drug to mothers and their infants at birth. Ranged against the minister and her tiny besieged department was a combined and hostile force composed of incensed action groups, specialist doctors, medical associations and international experts, all aided and abetted by the grossly ill-informed media. The department had no option but to throw enormous amounts of its energies into a desperate rearguard action to preserve its right to deny nevirapine to the mothers and new-born infants who needed it. Even the evil international drug manufacturers teamed up against Manto’s beleaguered unit, offering nevirapine at no cost to her department.

This terrible confrontation went as far as the Constitutional Court where, sadly, Field-Marshal Manto had to surrender. It is said that casualties among babies were especially heavy in this long-running engagement. Some are still in the process of dying. After Nevirapine Hall could be a visit to one of the ‘terminal creches” run by charity groups.

There are other examples of a truly exciting public management, one that has few equals in the current world. The South African health ministry has managed to flatten all records for dissimulation, procrastination and ingenious denial.

And there could also be a job-creating market in South African health department souvenirs: condoms with staples through them, ribbon-decorated cans of Virodene to help unblock drains, even the humble African potato. Come on Valli, stop dragging your feet.

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