Even though it means agreeing to think like John Battersby for a whole 10 minutes, I count myself among the small handful of citizens who acknowledge the perspicacity and intellectual vigour of our miserably undervalued Minister of Health, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
As with so many in the Mbeki-appointed Cabinet, Minister Tshabalala-Msimang owns to analytical and humanist aspirations that are neither easily detectable to the frivolous eye nor, more especially, to the precipitate dismissions of un-embedded journalists.
|
|
![]() |
My buoyant opinions of the minister have this last week floated ever higher, this because last Thursday I came into possession of some facts that divulge how subtle and imaginative is Minister Tshabalala-Msimang’s management of her sombre portfolio. How these facts came into my possession is, of course, privileged information. Despite the best efforts of our higher courts, journalists’ sources still enjoy secure asylum. I reveal only that my “mole” in Cabinet circles acquired these facts completely by chance. While a particularly volatile Congress of South African Trade Unions protest assembly was taking place outside the Union Buildings, an internal messenger became discombobulated by all the noise and police sirens and delivered an important file on to the wrong desk. It was that simple.
As a result, I have in my possession the contents of a highly confidential memorandum, which itemises certain Ministry of Health initiatives in regard to the future control and prevention of the dreaded HIV. These initiatives appear to be ready for Cabinet rubber-stamping. All I can say is I hope that the hysterical members of the Treatment Action Campaign will appreciate how wrong they have been about our government’s emphasis on a properly graduated and affordable campaign against the HIV/Aids plague.
These new strategies of the health ministry focus on the most obvious way to prevent the transmission of the HIV: by “unprotected” sexual congress of some kind or other. If the rate of consensual sex is decreased, the spread of the virus will be retarded.
First in line is the bold proposal that female circumcision be introduced. The theory behind this recommendation is simple: if the possibility of female carnal gratification is all but totally removed, females will be less tempted to indulge in “non-essential lovemaking. They will tend to reserve their lovemaking for reproductive ends.” It is suggested that, as in Westernised males, the circumcision of females takes place in babyhood when there is less chance of detrimental psychosomatic side effects.
The proposals acknowledge that administrative submission of male sexual desires also requires durable measures. Indeed, it seldom matters to the average South African male whether the female recipient of his lust is enjoying the experience. Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Doll remains the prevailing attitude. But there will be a certain spill-over from what the document terms its “female libidinous reduction strategy”, in that circumcised females will not tend to be nearly as provocative and coquettish as their non-surgically enhanced sisters and will eschew their licentious temptation of males.
The document affords much space to the vexed subject of pregnancy and its ultimate and costly penalty, childbirth. It is argued, quite rationally, that there seems little purpose in a government paying exorbitant prices for drugs that do little but help one HIV-infected person become two HIV-infected persons. Some earlier form of prevention of mother-to-infant transmission of the HIV is necessary as it’s already agreed by the government that anti-retroviral (ARV) inhibition of such transmission is impossible to guarantee because of impenetrable administrative safeguards.
An obvious alternative to expensive ARV therapy is mooted in the new proposals. Like sexual congress, the rate of pregnancy must also drastically be reduced. Here again a fairly simple surgical procedure could be introduced on a nationwide scale: the sterilisation of females but entirely on a voluntary basis and only after appropriate counselling either by doctors, specially trained nurses, traditional healers or policemen holding ranks of sergeant or higher. Using so-called Minimum Invasive Surgery (MIS) females can undergo Fallopian salpingectomy under no more than a local anaesthetic. Free “Home MIS” kits will be made available. Female sterilisation could also take place soon after birth but only after appropriate counselling of the infant.
Proposals dealing specifically with the subduement of male sexual desire are dealt with robustly in the health ministry document, though surgical intercession in males is not recommended save for mild approval of vasectomy procedures. What the document does endorse is a wholesale prohibition of public imagery and entertainment that is erotically stimulating to males. Here it refers to the dismay expressed recently by a visiting Nigerian clergyman at the display outside a Swaziland airport of a tourism billboard depicting an bare-breasted woman. Such “indecent” sexual imagery, said the clergyman, would arouse men to carnal irresponsibility and so increase the HIV infection rate.
The approval and adoption of such reasoned and practical ideas will show this latest health ministry document to be yet another in a glittering catalogue of initiatives that have come from a ministry under the boisterous suzerainty of Minister Tshabalala-Msimang. Is it small wonder that she is held in such high regard by President Thabo Mbeki?
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby