United Nations special envoy to Africa Stephen Lewis ”is not Africa’s Messiah” and does not understand South Africa’s HIV/Aids programmes, said the Department of Health on Saturday.
”We reject with contempt the statement made by Stephen Lewis with regard to response of South African government to the challenge of HIV and Aids,” said departmental spokesperson Sibani Mngadi in a statement.
Mngadi said Lewis’s comments should not be seen as the views of the UN and its agencies, which continue to work on HIV/Aids with South Africa.
On Friday, Lewis told the International Aids Conference in Toronto, Canada, that South Africa will ”never achieve redemption” for its HIV/Aids policies as 600 to 800 people a day die of Aids in the country.
Lewis said what the government is doing is ”wrong, immoral and indefensible”. He accused the government of expounding HIV/Aids theories ”more worthy of a lunatic fringe than a concerned and compassionate state”.
”The South African government has tripled the budget allocation for the HIV and Aids over the last four years from just over R1-billion in 2002 to R3,5-billion in 2005. This allocation constitutes 90% of resources currently being used to implement HIV and Aids in South Africa,” said Mngadi.
He said Lewis should say whether any other country has distributed, as South Africa has done, more than 340-million male condoms and close to three million female condoms each year free of charge, or has put more people on anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment that SA has, with 175 000 people getting ARVs.
Mngadi said Africa does not need an ”unsubstantiated attack”, but rather a delivery on the many resolutions made by international organisations and other countries on ”addressing poverty and underdevelopment, which increase the vulnerability of our populations to diseases”.
The African National Congress earlier called statements made by Lewis during the conference ”unacceptable”.
However, ”It is not my job to be silenced by a government when I know what it is doing is wrong, immoral and indefensible,” he said.
He also mentioned the arrests of Treatment Action Campaign leader Zackie Achmat and 44 protesters who occupied provincial government offices in Cape Town earlier on Friday. They were calling for the arrest of Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang after the death of a prisoner with Aids, which Lewis said ”should never have taken place”.
”It really is distressing when the coercive apparatus of the state is brought against the most principled members of society,” said Lewis. — Sapa