Looking back on 2006 it is instructive to note how far South Africa has come since the dark days of August when the country’s worldwide standing on its HIV/Aids approach reached an all-time low, official opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon said on Friday.
In his regular internet column, the DA leader — who steps down next May — said that as South Africa commemorates World Aids Day ”this is an appropriate juncture to reflect on where we as a nation stand on this critical issue”.
He said: ”At year’s end, a refreshing turnabout on government’s Aids policy beckons — none too soon for the country, as we wrestle with a pandemic which threatens all our futures on every front, from the health and prospects of each individual to that of society as a whole.”
In August, the 16th World Conference on HIV/Aids was held in Toronto, Canada — ”an event now regarded as a pivotal moment for South Africa’s approach to tackling the issue”.
Looking back to November, Deputy Health Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge admitted that South Africa had been ”severely embarrassed” at the conference, which saw Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang put up what appeared to be ”a high-class vegetable stall”, and ludicrously forward beetroot and garlic as treatment for Aids.
President Thabo Mbeki’s public attitude to the syndrome — which Leon described as an odd mixture of outright denialism and questionable pseudo-science — ”was personified in the person of his hand-picked health minister, the truculent, obstructionist Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang”.
”Government’s unwillingness to tackle the pandemic boldly and unflinchingly had not only raised the fatality level; it had brought us into major disrepute, if not odium, overseas,” Leon charged.
In reaction the vegetable stall, Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy for HIV/Aids, described South Africa’s Aids policy as ”wrong, immoral and indefensible” and ”more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state”.
Leon said: ”The ridicule that South Africa suffered in Toronto did, however, have a beneficial effect: government began to review its approach to tackling the virus.”
Leon noted the words of the deputy minister: ”Toronto galvanised [the] government to be on a new footing, particularly around streamlining of communication on our strategy and our plan and greater mobilisation of all partners.”
Today, government’s new stance on HIV/Aids is being spearheaded by Madlala-Routledge — whom government sources confirmed was previously excluded from HIV issues by the minister — and Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who were a welcome breath of fresh air.
The government’s health plan — crafted by the government and civil society — identifies young people between 15 and 24 as a priority, and aims to halve the rate of new infections and provide treatment to 750 000 adults and children by 2011.
”While the effectiveness of the plan has yet to be tested, its mere existence — and in so short a time since the Toronto fiasco — can only be considered a mammoth step forward from the moribund, not to say vegetative, policies of the health minister.” — I-Net Bridge