More than a year after his ‘recall” it is still open season on former president Thabo Mbeki, whose views on HIV/Aids are belatedly being castigated by his former comrades. What South African activists, courts and patients raised a decade ago, the government is admitting today.
Mbeki was an Aids denialist whose fatal refusal to recognise the scope of the pandemic helped to fill up our cemeteries. He and his unpopular health minister had to be taken to court several times before they began to provide treatment, even to pregnant mothers.
In a country ravaged by HIV, Mbeki famously said he personally did not know anyone who had died of the disease. He later retreated from the public debate (Can a virus cause a syndrome?) and his government embarked on a comprehensive prevention and treatment programme. But by then immense damage had been caused and many lives lost.
Now a chorus within government and the ANC is saying he should be charged with genocide. The truth is that if he were, half of President Jacob Zuma’s Cabinet, including Zuma himself, would also find themselves in the dock.
Most of them were in the ANC leadership, in government and in the Cabinet when these decisions were taken and, with the honourable exception of Barbara Hogan, they either approved or looked the other way. As head of the South African National Aids Council, Zuma was personally responsible for handling the issue at the time — and he said nothing.
It is understandable that the current administration should be anxious to put distance between itself and this toxic legacy, but genocide, a special category of crime against humanity, is unlikely to stick to Mbeki, and it is not helpful in moving us forward.
And we are, at last, beginning to move forward.
Julius Malema, the youth league’s marketing genius, is out on the hustings popularising condoms, demanding of his large constituency that they greet each other with a: ‘How are you, where is your condom?”
Meanwhile, government spokesperson Themba Maseko, instead of squirming in discomfort as journalists bombard him with hostile questions, is relaying the message from Cabinet that he actually believes that we should not let an arid debate about numbers distract us from the urgency of fighting the disease.
Where once Manto Tshabalala-Msimang backed up provincial ministers, such as Sibongile Manana and Peggy Nkonyeni, as they persecuted doctors for helping HIV patients, new minister Aaron Motsoaledi has carpeted the Free State health MEC, Sisi Mabe, for failing to provide adequate treatment.
This is exactly the kind of clear, responsible leadership we need. But Motsoaledi should refrain from aligning himself with those who are simply using the issue once again to castigate Mbeki. The failure of the past decade is more systemic, and sadder, than one man’s error.
What would be helpful is something else quietly discussed within ANC circles in the wake of Mbeki’s resignation: an apology to the nation.
Acceptance of responsibility and public atonement would be an immensely powerful foundation for the welcome new push against the disease — the beginning, perhaps, of a very different story, and one that we urgently need to begin.