The spat between President Thabo Mbeki and the Democratic Alliance over his reply to a question in the National Assembly on Thursday continued on Friday, with both Mbeki and DA leader Tony Leon referring to the matter in their respective weekly newsletters.
The issue arose when DA MP Ryan Coetzee referred to remarks Mbeki made on the African National Congress website, ANC Today, on October 1 about racism and the recently released crime statistics, and asked a number of questions.
Coetzee wanted to know, among other things, if the government has any information suggesting rape is not pervasive in South Africa and does not, in part, account for the spread of HIV.
He also asked whether prevailing sexual practices and attitudes of some men towards women do not account, in large part, for the spread of HIV in the country.
In his reply, Mbeki hardly referred to HIV/Aids and concentrated instead on the ”central issue” of racism, which was the theme of the letter.
Mbeki’s full reply to Coetzee was published on ANC Today on Friday, along with an editor’s note saying Coetzee’s question merely pretended to follow up Mbeki’s observations of October 1.
Mbeki said rather than discuss the central issues raised, Coetzee wanted him to ”engage in a televised debate that will help some people in our country to perpetuate the very dangerous pretence that racism in our country died with the holding of our first democratic elections 10 years ago”.
”Whatever the circumstances, and regardless of the regularity of catholic incantations about ‘playing the race card’, I, for my part, will not keep quiet while others whose minds have been corrupted by the disease of racism, accuse us, the black people of South Africa, Africa and the world, as being, by virtue of our Africanness and skin colour, lazy, liars, foul-smelling, diseased, corrupt, violent, amoral, sexually depraved, animalistic, savage and rapist,” Mbeki said.
Coetzee’s question, arising out of the letter about racism, suggested he believed racism was not serious enough to deserve his [Coetzee’s] attention, and did not raise ”even one query about racism”.
”He wants me to cooperate with him to put the challenge of racism in our country out of sight, and therefore out of mind.
”In the letter in ANC Today … I cited two instances of people, one of them a white South African woman, who have written that our cultures, religion and social norms as Africans condition us to be ‘rampant sexual beasts, unable to control our urges, unable to keep our legs crossed, unable to keep it in our pants’ — the rapists the honourable Coetzee says that, ‘in large part [account] for the spread of HIV in the country’.
”I would like to assure the honourable Coetzee that the millions of Africans in our country, in Africa and the world did not fight against apartheid racism and white domination to create space for them to continue to be subjected to dehumanising, demeaning and insulting racism,” Mbeki said.
In his own newsletter on the DA website, SA Today, Leon said the ”simple, yes-or-no question” that was posed to Mbeki was whether he was prepared to lead the fight against HIV and Aids in South Africa.
”The president refused to answer. He also refused to state whether HIV causes Aids. And he refused to withdraw the false accusations of racism he recently made against prominent local and international Aids activists in his weekly newsletter.”
Instead, he recited a ”litany of racist caricatures of what bordered on the pornographic, and implying that the DA believed them”.
He claimed, for example, that the DA and others believe African women ”cannot keep their legs crossed” and African men ”cannot keep it in their pants”.
No amount of spin can hide the profound failure of Mbeki and his government to deal with the HIV/Aids pandemic decimating the nation, he said.
”We also know from medical and sociological studies that male sexual behaviour towards females in South Africa is a major factor in the spread of the epidemic.
”That is not a racist statement. It is a medical fact.”
Studies by the South African Medical Research Council, as well as by international researchers, revealed South African women suffered from high levels of sexual violence and abuse, towards which South African men showed an alarming degree of tolerance, Leon said. — Sapa