Johannesburg
FOR OVER A DECADE, the African National Congress-run government of South Africa has endured criticism both domestically and abroad for what can best be described as its lackadaisical approach to fighting the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Though he now prefers abject silence to instigating controversy on the issue, it was not so long ago that President Thabo Mbeki very publicly entertained the theory that HIV does not cause AIDS, going so far as to host a conference in 2000 for fringe American medical “experts” pushing that lie. And though the South African government belatedly began disbursing antiretroviral drugs to infected pregnant women in 2002, it did so only when forced by the country’s constitutional court–a decision it fought tooth-and-nail. Because of the government’s longtime resistance to providing antiretrovirals, hundreds of thousands of HIV sufferers continue to languish without care–even though the drugs come free thanks to the pharmaceutical companies themselves and Western aid.
Considering South Africa’s grim AIDS statistics, it’s surprising that its citizens have been so passive in accepting government inaction: South Africa has more people living with HIV than any other country, with 19 percent of those age 18 to 49 infected; since 2003, about 300,000 South Africans have died each year due to AIDS–nearly 800 a day.
Thus, it was with great consternation that South Africans, especially AIDS activists, read about the behavior last week of their health minister, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto. The conference welcomed 20,000 delegates from over 100 countries and featured such prominent philanthropic figures as Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. Many nations and NGOs had displays at the conference, and what made headlines here in South Africa was the country’s exhibition adorned with beetroot, lemons, and garlic–a combination that Tshabalala-Msimang has long endorsed as an “alternative” AIDS cocktail to the antiretroviral drugs developed in the West. When media attention focused on the display, flaks from the South African Health Ministry hastily added a few pill bottles in an attempt to damp the tide of criticism. Yet news of this blunder did not seem to surprise many people back in Johannesburg. They have grown used to their government’s crackpot AIDS theories.
There are signs, however, that the ANC’s negligence is finally taking its toll on the party. Last week, the Sunday Times, South Africa’s most respected broadsheet, called for Tshabalala-Msimang’s dismissal as Health Minister. “Dr. Beetroot leaves SA red-faced in Toronto” the paper’s front page blared. AIDS activist Zachie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign was arrested, along with 43 others, while occupying a government building in Cape Town last Friday, demanding that the Health Minister be charged with homicide. The Democratic Alliance, the country’s official opposition, also called for her resignation. But the harshest words for the South African government came from an unlikely source: a U.N. bureaucrat. UNAIDS envoy Stephen Lewis called the ANC’s laziness on AIDS “wrong, immoral and indefensible” and said that the government’s HIV-denialist theories and promotion of alternative treatments are “more worthy of a lunatic fringe than a concerned and compassionate state.”
As it almost always does in the face of domestic white or international criticism, the South African government played the race card. A Health Ministry spokesman said that Lewis “is not Africa’s Messiah.” According to South Africa’s Business Day, Tshabalala-Msimang thundered to the South African conference delegation, “I don’t mind to be called ‘Dr Beetroot. . . . You can’t tell me at this stage I must abandon what I learnt as a medical student.” (Tshabalala-Msimang earned her MD abroad at the First Leningrad Medical Institute in the former USSR, where many of the ANC’s current leadership received education and military training.)
Tshabalala-Msimang is not merely inept, but corrupt as w! ell. According to the Afrikaans-language Beeld newspaper, she is set to hit the road in a gold-colored Mercedes-Benz S500 valued at $1,000,000 Rand ($142,000), this in a country where a third of the population still lives in abject poverty. The car was ordered by a staff member at the Health Ministry, and will partly be funded by a government allowance to which Ministers are entitled.
“Every kook who wants to make a lot of money out of HIV can sell anything with the blessing of the health minister,” the activist Achmat said August 17 in an interview with the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Tragically, it is South Africa’s power-holders who are selling their people the greatest bill of goods.
James Kirchick is a Boston-based writer traveling in South Africa.
