Presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga wants evidence of dereliction of duty by the health minister. But the Aids-drug lobby offers only Wikipedia constitutionalism, asserting that Thabo Mbeki has fired the true architect of the country’s widely admired HIV/Aids policies, former deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge.
Wikipedia has invented the following constitutional practice, now parroted by Mbeki’s critics: ”In the current South African system, the Cabinet can override the President. Although its votes are private, it appeared to have done so in votes to declare as Cabinet policy that HIV is the cause of Aids; and then, in August 2003, in a promise to formulate a national treatment plan that would include ARVs.”
Even Wikipedia would not claim that Ms Madlala-Routledge was deputy health minister at the time. But Aids-lobby journalism rushes to credit her. Thus Mbeki is a centralising dictator surrounded by sycophants until anybody around him does good things, in which case he promptly becomes a powerless madman within his own Cabinet.
Add a dash of cheap scandal. While law-abiders must be tough on crime and tough on the proceeds of crime, a newspaper has received and published stolen medical records (who stole them is irrelevant).
If scandal is the issue, Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya has done stuff far more ghastly and more recently than anything he levels at the health minister. Writing in the Mail & Guardian in 1991, Makhanya (behind a pseudonym) confessed his role in a marauding mob that stole, burned, stabbed and killed in KwaZulu-Natal on February 2 1990. ”One man was literally chopped beyond recognition. His eyes were gouged out and his genitals cut off, while I looked on. An elderly man, seeing the bloodthirsty mob running towards him, cried haplessly: ‘Forgive me, my children, please forgive me.’ ‘Since when are we your children?’ came the unsympathetic replies as bushknives and axes descended on the man.”
Yet a monster must be made of ”Manto” because the Aids-drug lobby has no answer to the mounting scholarship that vindicates Mbeki. ”Much of the opprobrium came from South Africa’s refusal to adhere to the World Health Organisation’s Aids treatment model, which aimed to get as many people on treatment as quickly as possible, regardless of sustainability. Recognising the risk to patient safety, South Africa opted for a slower, more responsible development,” writes Philip Stevens of the London Campaign for Fighting Diseases, whom I quote in Fit to Govern.
The liberal intellectual Helen Epstein, who covers Aids policy for the New York Review of Books, has just published The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS (2007), advocating what she calls ”African solutions”. Sound familiar? And where is the Treatment Action Campaign’s boisterous riposte to William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University, whose The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006) was named Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Financial Times and The Economist?
Having powerfully attacked the Washington Consensus in economics (The Elusive Quest for Growth, 2001), Easterly and others have now demolished the Washington Consensus on Aids-drug policy. ”The activists have been only too successful in focusing attention on treatment instead of prevention,” he writes. Easterly’s adversary Jeffrey Sachs, an architect of the moribund Washington Consensus in economics, still predictably pushes the old and discredited Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) Aids-drug consensus.
Illiberal journalism has hidden such truths from us in order to make a monster of Mbeki. An M&G editorial (September 30 2005), for instance, celebrated Zwelinzima Vavi’s newfound status as a TAC mouthpiece: ”The Treatment Action Campaign … deserves heralding and mimicking … may it corral many more mouthpieces into its stable.”
Thankfully the damage is coming undone. On February 2 2007 the M&G‘s Vicki Robinson wrote of Mbeki’s ”HIV/Aids quackery” in which he ”fatally refuted the scientific link between HIV and Aids”, adding that ”Mbeki does not say anything substantive or persuasive about HIV and Aids”. But in Fit to Govern, where Mbeki’s true logic stands unsuppressed, Robinson found ”a convincing argument for how Mbeki’s stance on HIV/Aids has been misunderstood and in turn capitalised on by powerful individuals such as Supreme Court of Appeal Judge Edwin Cameron” (M&G, June 15).
Ronald Suresh Roberts is the author of Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki