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June 24, 2002 LETTER FROM SOUTH AFRICA: MORE DRUG THERAPY FOR AIDS, LITTLE MONEY FOR FOOD By Anita Allen At the start of his Budget Vote in parliament last week, South African President Thabo Mbeki quipped that he had asked for it to be gazetted that life begins at 60. It was his sixtieth birthday, but considering what he had already packed into those years and coupled with his urbane delivery, it was a sparkling moment of pure theatre. As the riff of a mid-year report back to taxpayers justifying funds to his office, it was fighting talk (1). Coming in the first year of the Century of Africa which Mbeki champions, it was a mark of the man. Born 18 June 1942, Mbeki is the barefoot boy who came out of a southern African wilderness to lead his people. His story is the stuff of legend. From childhood he has been groomed by the African National Congress leadership to be one of them. To avoid his incarceration or worse by Apartheid enemies, he was sent into exile as a 20-year-old youth. Since then, he more than any other has shaped the words that describe his people and the dream they have of a better tomorrow. The result is that without having to resort to spin doctors and whenever he has been accorded a platform, Mbeki offers ANC-endorsed ideas for testing, transforming abstract thoughts into actual processes and taking those that journey with him into conceptualising theory and into practice. Like persuading militarists in his own organisation, South Africa and Africa, to take shares in ploughs instead of missiles, especially nuclear ones. This at a time when other continents fuel the military option. So he knows all about swimming upstream. It has been a momentous year for Mbeki, South Africa, Africa and the world in the journey to a better tomorrow. The climax of various endeavours lies ahead with June poised as the turning point on the stages of the world where the clash of the have and the have nots plays out. Just as it did in South Africa’s transitional talks, there’s a lot of huffing and puffing, general sabre rattling, and posturing. It can be as tedious as it is tragic, like G8 heads of state snubbing the World Summit on Food in Rome earlier this month. Mbeki lamented their absence in his keynote address, which looked ahead to the next event on the calendar for world leaders - the World Summit on Sustainable Development. The Rio+10 conference is to be hosted by South Africa at the end of August and as things stand there is no certainty that President George W Bush and/or other G8 leaders will attend. The US certainly gave little support to what was heralded at the Rio Summit in 1992 as the Green Nineties. Instead of engaging the debate on what makes a healthy environment, it was dropped off US agendas and headlines faster than anyone could punch a voting card. It’s an open secret over here that W has decreed global warming to be a myth. Last year’s World Summit on Racism in South Africa was also boycotted by the US. So South Africans have no doubt that the US is thumbing a nose at their leader and all he stands for. It’s David versus Goliath all over again, as far as South Africans are concerned. This week Mbeki steps out onto the G8 stage to sell the blueprint for Africa’s development to the United States and its allies. He sold the New Programme for Africa’s Development (Nepad) to the World Economic Forum earlier in June. Global business leaders bought in unanimously, so one assumes the availability of money does not represent a problem. Mbeki wants the money to be invested in sustainable development projects to alleviate poverty in Africa. The US wants business as usual - you hold the begging bowl and we decide the if, how, when and who, of filling it. As things stand, it is "our" gang versus "your" gang like West Side Story with a global cast. A measure of the drama is that last week, Bush, US Secretary of State Colin Powell and US Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson stood shoulder to shoulder in the Whitehouse Rose Garden after getting Congressional approval for $500 million over five years to supply the anti-HIV drug, Nevirapine, to South Africa’s pregnant women and babies. This means that at a time that Africans are asking for food, the US is going to give them drug therapy. In the process, the US is backing activists in South Africa who have petitioned the country’s highest court to order a reluctant government to supply antiretrovirals in public health facilities. In the messy, drawn out affair, there is one point of clarity: the answer to the question "What are the government’s constitutional responsibilities?" is not like a photo opportunity among roses, though there may be as many thorns. The Constitutional Court of South Africa includes the world’s most respected legal minds and judges who have served on the World Court. The collective honourship has gone into a deep funk on the matter and has yet to deliver a verdict. They have had more than a year to think about things as events unfolded here, then there were three days of hearings instead of two. Still the good judges were not satisfied and nearly two months later have asked for supplementary evidence to be filed. The word is out and about and in the media (2) that this just may have to do with an affidavit submitted to the Constitutional Court by Professor Sam Mhlongo South Africa’s Chief Practitioner and Specialist, Primary Health Care and Family Medicine at the Medical University of Southern Africa, and the only African on the Presidential Aids Advisory Panel who never loses an opportunity to question HIV-causes-AIDS. Aside from pre-empting SA’s Constitutional Court findings, the Bush Administration is clearly pitting itself against the Mbeki Cabinet and ANC-led government which is poised to intensify the work of the Presidential Aids Advisory Panel (3). The panel was instigated by Mbeki himself because he was worried about the toxicity of antiretrovirals! (4). The panel last met in July 2000, and a collaborative team involving all players, the US CDC and SA government was supposed to be conducting experiments to test the validity of tests currently used to diagnose HIV infection. Instead of taking the lead since it is so sure of the science, the US redeployed its representative Dr Helen Gayle and the experiment has stalled while the US does everything possible to pretend the panel never happened. HIV/AIDS is US science. If it won’t put this up for falsification what more can anyone do? Mbeki’s answer may well be found in what he had to say about diehards in his own country: At times of great social change, there are some who are passed over by those processes of transformation because they can see no further than their noses… Yet others sleep through these moments, like Rip van Winkles, and wake up to demand the restoration of the old order they knew when they fell into deep slumber. I am afraid there are some…who are victim to such misfortunes. The train of progress will pass them by. It may be that they may not even be able to catch the last coach. Nevertheless, the train will not stop. (5) So sure is the US of its ascendent position on HIV/AIDS, that the US Ambassador to South Africa, Cameron Hume wrote an open letter last week (6) telling South Africans not to despair about their president and his government’s reluctance to poison them, because Uncle Sam would be prepared to step in. Hume wrote: "When leadership, training, and financial support are provided to talented and innovative scientists, promising scientific ideas result." What promising ideas? In 20 years of US HIV/AIDS leadership, training and financial support there has not been one cure and certainly in South Africa condom distribution rises in tandem with the HIV/AIDS, just as death rates soar with antiretroviral distribution. Power to those who controls the purse strings on HIV/AIDS. In the US's case, that means $93 billion has been thrown into HIV research, training and prevention, according to its Library of Congress, as of November 2001. In his letter, Hume made it quite clear, that this means the US controls HIV/AIDS in South Africa. As Mbeki struts his stuff in Canada this week, it will be with the knowledge that history repeats itself. One hundred years ago, his predecessors started a movement aimed at uniting the people of South Africa. Today, early in a new century, Mbeki takes the pilot project to a full-scale model in Africa. Africans and their supporters all over the world will be hoping that the US will whole-heartedly join the effort to make the renaissance of Africa a reality. But frankly, it’s going to take more than spin doctoring to make George W. Bush come up smelling like roses. References:
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