As the South African government is finally coming to understand, President Robert Mugabe and his ministers make pledges and assurances they have no intention of honouring. At the African Union summit last week Zimbabwe Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge promised to react within seven days to a report critical of his country’s human rights record. No response has been forthcoming. Mudenge’s pledge, and his claim that Zimbabwe had not seen, or had the chance to respond to the report, appear to have been deliberate deceptions designed to prevent the document from being tabled at the summit.
Mugabe’s stance on the independent media must be seen in the same light. He, or his minions, apparently assured the South African government that they would withdraw or amend the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (Aippa), which introduces a draconian state licensing system for journalists and publications. Aippa was amended — but only to make it easier to secure convictions. Under the guise of spurious legality, the Act was then used to ban one of Zimbabwe’s independent publications, The Daily News. Legalistic persecution of the media has also taken the form of prosecuting journalists for misreporting — a provision that closely follows South Africa’s Police Act, one of apartheid’s most feared press clamps — and the expulsion of foreign journalists.
Now Mugabe’s state has turned its guns on the Mail & Guardian. Some weeks ago, we reported that one of his media puppets, The Sunday Mail, had falsely accused the M&G of using unaccredited journalists — a claim later repeated by the chairperson of the Media and Information Commission. This was followed by a police visit to our distributors and, in the latest outrage, a subpoena giving them access to the M&G‘s account in Harare on the pretext of investigating possible foreign exchange violations. It is quite clear what is happening. The powers that be have decided to silence our critical voice. They have instructed the police to mount a fishing expedition in the hope of chancing on some infringement that can be used to justify a crackdown. As M&G chief executive Trevor Ncube said this week: “It has become obvious that certain people in government have become intolerant of the M&G‘s coverage of unfolding events in Zimbabwe. Since they are unable to find fault with the paper’s reportage, the intention now is to find something, anything, to give them reason to stop the Zimbabwean public from reading the M&G.”
The police will find nothing — but that will not mean the M&G is out of danger. We urge all Zimbabweans of influence, and the South African government, to raise their voices against any further attack on press freedom in Zimbabwe.
Muddying the waters
What is our inscrutable Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, up to now? In a context where she could have trumpeted South Africa’s national treatment plan for HIV/Aids as a model for the developing world, Tshabalala-Msimang has instead chosen to muddy the waters, raise world eyebrows and sow alarm among South African activists by again appearing to question the efficacy of nevirapine in combating mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Small wonder that the United Nations’s special envoy at the world Aids conference in Bangkok, Stephen Lewis, should remark: “The kerfuffle and confusion … around nevirapine is the latest in a series of confusions which the world watches with some bewilderment.”
If the minister had expressed support for the use of nevirapine and merely remarked that it causes less resistance when used in a cocktail with other medicines, there would have been no outcry. Combination therapy is obviously more expensive than monotherapy, and fewer HIV-infected women would, logically, have access to it. But some research does suggest it is more effective than nevirapine alone.
But Tshabalala-Msimang could not confine herself to such an uncontroversial observation. True to her reputation as a defensive heifer in a china shop, she essentially claimed that research had vindicated her long-standing doubts about the drug, and complained that it had been prematurely forced on the South African government by the Constitutional Court. She then announced that the Health Department planned to review its treatment regime for HIV-infected pregnant women. A nascent charm offensive by this most unpopular of ministers lies in smithereens; South Africa has been the bully-boy of yet another international Aids conference.
The fact is that either on its own, or as part of a cocktail, nevirapine is the best, cheapest and most easily administered drug in cases of potential mother-to-child transmission of HIV. And it has been endorsed by the World Health Organisation. Every Aids drug, like every cancer drug, has its downside — but what is the alternative? Derogating nevirapine, as Tshabalala-Msimang appeared to do, can only demoralise and confuse Aids sufferers and the practitioners who try to help them. And lock the nation forever into a stasis on Aids, the country’s most serious challenge.