The head of communications in the Presidency, Murphy Morobe, has urged the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) to continue to speak out on the issue of HIV/Aids.
”You are our conscience,” he told several thousand TAC supporters who marched on Parliament on Wednesday to hand him a memorandum of demands.
The TAC is campaigning for the government to speed up the roll-out of its anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment programme, which it says has fallen far behind even its own targets.
The organisation has taken the government to court on Aids-related issues, and won, and in the past has called for Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to be arrested over the deaths of Aids victims.
Morobe said the TAC highlights the ”blind spots in society” where politicians and the government might not necessarily be able to go.
He said he knows TAC has been campaigning for a long time, and it does not have to stop now.
”You have a right to come here and prick our conscience every time,” he said. ”I bury my own cousins every week and every month; six already in three years.”
Morobe’s remarks stand in contrast to President Thabo Mbeki’s statement in 2003 that he did not personally know anyone who had died of Aids.
The memorandum, which Morobe said he will give to Deputy President Jacob Zuma, said by the Department of Health’s own admission about half a million people had needed treatment in 2003.
The government had planned to treat 53 000 by the end of March last year, but by the end of December only 27 000 people were on treatment in the public sector.
”This injustice exists because there is insufficient political leadership to make the programme a success,” the TAC said.
Dr Lydia Cairncross, a surgical registrar at Cape Town’s Somerset hospital, told the marchers that the public health sector will collapse unless ARVs are rolled out.
”It’s not so much ARVs as the comprehensive, rational treatment of the Aids epidemic is essential to bolster the public health system,” she said afterwards.
”Up to now the government has failed to provide that, which leaves workers in the public sector with no option for treatment.
”It fills hospital beds, it takes care away from other illnesses, because we are retroactively trying to treat the Aids epidemic.”
Marchers chanted a song with words including ”we don’t want garlic”, a reference to Tshabalala-Msimang’s advocacy of a garlic and olive-oil diet for people with Aids.
A TAC supporter ripped down a banner that had been hung on a government building near the gates of Parliament by the Mathias Rath Health Foundation, apparently in anticipation of the TAC march, which claimed that the ARV drug AZT ”kills”.
Rath has formed an alliance with the Traditional Healers Organisation in a bid to persuade people not to use ARVs.
However, Nonkosi Khumalo, manager of the TAC’s treatment project, who is herself on ARVs, said people living with Aids know exactly what is good for them.
”We do not need Mathias Rath and his group to come here and tell us what is dangerous for us,” she said. — Sapa