We have not stifled debate
Rena Singer asserts that the Kaiser Family Foundation has stifled the Aids debate in South Africa (”Is loveLife making them love life?”, August 19). This is unfounded and untrue.
The foundation’s 20-year record in South Africa clearly demonstrates that we have invested substantially in encouraging broader and better informed public discussion of HIV/Aids, and in shaping the national response to the epidemic.
The foundation helped the Mandela government establish the national ante-natal clinic survey system. It played a key role in developing technologies for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) and funded evaluation of the government’s initial roll-out of the national PMTCT programme, as well as cutting-edge research on the female condom and microbicides, and services to sex workers, truck drivers and youth. We have supported efforts to increase access to anti-retroviral treatment.
Our public information efforts include the first nationally representative household surveys of health conducted in 1993 and 1995, the first survey of South African households affected by HIV/Aids in 2001, and a baseline national survey of HIV prevalence among youth in 2003.
Over the past 10 years, the foundation has enabled various South African media organisations to improve their coverage of HIV/Aids reporting, supported the Health-e-News Service and paid the costs of journalists to report from the bi-annual international Aids conferences.
The foundation has also organised many high-level travelling seminars to Southern African countries for local and foreign media editors to educate them about the realities of HIV/Aids.
And the foundation-funded Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights has for the past six years recognised leaders in the South African Aids struggle. Indeed, in Nelson Mandela’s words: ”The Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation can be proud of its record as a partner in this process [of building the South African democracy].”
The foundation has over the past five years provided major support to loveLife. Singer reports that one of the most widely recognised contributions of loveLife is more open discussion of HIV/Aids and the high-risk sexual behaviour driving the epidemic in South Africa. It is incomprehensible how such a record could be construed as — stifling public debate. — Michael R Sinclair, The Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation
Singer quoted me as saying: ”We don’t know whether loveLife is working.”
I did say that, but in a larger context. My view is that loveLife is a grand experiment worth undertaking.
Youth, the future of South Africa, are the ones most likely to get HIV, and this is true for youth all over sub-Saharan Africa. loveLife is one attempt to change that reality.
My full comments to Singer (which she failed to include) indicated that we have to let the experiment run, evaluate the outcomes and determine the impact. Until we have the final data, we will not know whether or not loveLife is working.
This is the way it is with any clinical trial. Important results were just presented in Rio regarding male circumcision and protection against acquiring HIV. The results were highly impressive — a 65% reduction in HIV infection among those circumcised. One could easily have written, a year ago, that we don’t know whether it will work.
Those who don’t like loveLife should come up with experiments of their own. We need as many models as possible. — Thomas J Coates, professor, department of medicine, University of California, Los Angeles
![]()
Hunting rogues are exceptions
Your article on canned cheetah hunting (”We almost by a canned cheetah”, August 12) is an example of the sensationalism that so often surrounds hunting and conservation.
The IUCN’s Red Data Book says there are slightly more than 250 cheetahs here, and they are close to being endangered. The species is not on the verge of extinction.
The anti-hunting lobby uses such distortions to further its cause and tarnish the reputation of the bulk of the hunting industry.
The Red Data Book recommends sustainable utilisation of animals, which can include hunting, and the public needs to understand the role this can play.
A cheetah quota might allow more ranchers to keep animals on the farm, because there is a commercial return. Right now they just cost farmers, hence the species’ persecution.
Hunters agree that canned hunting is deplorable. There are rogues in any industry. Please treat these as exceptions. — Richard Lendrum, Rivonia
![]()
Stop pushing Makoni
Is Simba Makoni looking for a job? He won’t speak to most Zimbabwean journalists, so maybe that’s why he spoke to Nic Dawes (”Change agent?” August 19).
Makoni is a loyal and long serving politburo member of Zanu-PF, which has inflicted terrible damage on the people.
He isn’t even an economist or a banker. Most economically literate Zimbabweans never rated him, as he has no courage.
The only time he showed a little was when he resigned as finance minister after Robert Mugabe wouldn’t allow him to devalue the Zim dollar. But he stayed in the party’s hierarchy, helping shape its policies and excesses. Where was he during Operation Murambatsvina?
He says Zanu-PF and the government will continue to improve the Constitution. Really? Last Thursday, Zanu-PF pushed through 22 clauses of a constitutional Bill empowering it to take away people’s passports if they act against the ”national interest.” What the national interest is, it doesn’t say.
Makoni says Zanu-PF could begin political reform ”if it’s defined within very narrow parameters.There is will if we are not compelled to deal with an entity we do not perceive as national. There is will if people agree that we are the aggrieved party.”
Is the ”entity” he refers to the Movement for Democratic Change? If so, why does he think it is not national in character? It is the first party to genuinely reject tribalism and regionalism.
What does he mean by saying Zanu-PF is ”aggrieved”? That he and politburo colleagues can’t get visas to travel to Europe or the United States?
Makoni has done nothing to stop the small space for democracy in Zimbabwe getting smaller. Stop pushing him. — FRD Ndlovu, Harare
![]()
Declare the emperor naked
In the article ”The $100 barrel” (August 19), three journalists analyse why the oil price is so high and together convince themselves — and try to convince us — that the Emperor of Cheap Oil Forever is fully clothed and likely to stay that way.
In fact, the Emperor is down to his underpants and doesn’t look like stopping there.
The journalists say not a word about the underlying reason for price increases — the imminent peak in global oil production caused by our having extracted the easy half of what’s there, leaving the much more difficult and expensive half as the basis for meeting future needs.
We all grew up in an era of cheap, abundant oil, and our economies and societies are predicated on it. We could have foreseen since mid-last century the global production peak, but were too busy working out what next to do with the stuff as it poured out of the ground and nobody wanted to poop the mother of all parties.
Now that time has come, or very nearly. Yet we reach for any arcane explanation other than the underlying one. Perhaps this is because the rational part of our brain knows we must start developing alternative ways of doing a whole lot of things and some things we’re used to may no longer be possible at all.
This is uncomfortable to contemplate, so we distract ourselves by burrowing into the micro-detail of ”futures curves”. I suggest we firmly declare the Emperor naked and start looking the consequences squarely in the eye. — Peter Willis, University of Cambridge Programme for Industry, Cape Town
![]()
Merit must be priority
If Vuyani Ngalwana wants to credit his appointment as Pension Funds Adjudicator to affirmative action (”I am an AA candidate and proud of it”, August 19), that is his right, even if many people see his merit before his colour.
But he is mistaken if he believes affirmative action is solely responsible for the appointment of black people who would not have had such opportunities under apartheid. The dismantling of apartheid racial discrimination played at least as important a role as affirmative action in opening opportunities for blacks and women.
Forms of affirmative action aimed at black people in private companies and private institutions appeared before apartheid’s fall, though not on a large scale and not as public policy.
A few forward-thinking people recog-nised then that affirmative action is necessary to break through enduring racial prejudices; to bridge the apartheid skills gap by identifying new talent; to create new role models; and to address past injustices.
But affirmative action’s primary beneficiaries tend to be the elite members of previously disadvantaged groups, not the poor and marginalised.
Affirmative action works for people like Ngalwana, who had private schooling. It does not work for the average person ”roaming the streets of Gugulethu”, as he puts it. In fact, there are more people roaming those streets today, after more than a decade of affirmative action, than there were before.
The government’s ideological approach to affirmative action, which reduces human beings to racial units, has stunted economic growth and service delivery by removing qualified people from the public service, creating inefficiencies in business, and encouraging skilled people — black and white — to look overseas for opportunities.
In that sense, affirmative action has hurt the groups that are its intended beneficiaries.
South Africa must therefore seek a balance between affirmative action on the one hand and merit-based appointments on the other, with merit remaining the first priority. — Joel Pollak, Cape Town
![]()
South Africa has not scratched the surface and neo-conservatives are already clamouring for the destruction of affirmative action.
One only had to listen to Henry Louis Gates Jnr’s speech at the recent Nelson Mandela lecture series to appreciate what affirmative action has done for black luminaries who, as Ngalwana puts it, ”would probably be roaming the streets of Gugulethu wondering what was wrong with this country”.
Keep it up, Vuyani! You’re just what the doctor ordered. — Benny Makola, Johannesburg
![]()
Everyone’s a critic
Muff Andersson (”Beyond Third cinema”, August 19) clearly believes that if you dish out criticism you are exempt from receiving it. This is deeply unattractive. So is her attack on Shaun de Waal, one of this country’s top film critics.
I thought his criticism of Max and Mona was extremely generous and hardly anti-African. Unless, of course, director Teddy Mattera is also not as pristine an honorary African as Andersson seems to consider herself.
De Waal is entitled to (and eminently qualified for) his criticism of Zulu Love Letter. ”The people” won’t suffer as a result. Unless proponents of ”the people” like Andersson actually think, deep down, that ”the people” are incapable of forming their own opinions.
By the same token, De Waal didn’t like Ian Gabriel’s Forgiveness. That makes him, according to Andersson’s scintillating logic, anti-white too.
The film industry should be grateful that it has a critic like De Waal, who is indifferent to its economics, intrigues and the ”national project” that is constantly implied. All he cares about is the narrative evidence in front of him, whether African or not.
Andersson execrably fails to mask her racism and sexism towards De Waal. Who and what does she think she is? Maybe the answer lies in slightly misquoting another white old tart, Christopher Hampton: ”Like most intellectuals, [s]he is intensely stupid.” — Neil Sonnekus, Johannesburg
![]()
Infantile
Astonishingly, Karen Armstrong believes the habit of reading and the ”detailed familiarity” with scripture that this has resulted in has not lead to insight, but to ”strident, misplaced certainty” (”Tying down God’s word”, August 19).
By recommending that we read less and trust our emotions more, she encourages that uncritical receptivity upon which all fundamentalism depends.
Better advice by far is to discard the infantile and antediluvian notion that any script could be ”the word of God”, and thereby discharge all of us from the bogus challenge of searching for meaning where none exists. — Colin Bower, Hout Bay
![]()
E-mail a letter to the editor
Please include your name and address. Letters must be received by 5pm Monday. Be as brief as possible. The editor reserves the right to edit letters and to withhold from publication any letter which he believes contains factual inaccuracies, or is based on misrepresentation.