FROM DAILY MAVERICK 25 MARCH 2020

ANALYSIS: FACTS V. QUACKS

Comparing the government responses to #Covid19 under Ramaphosa and #HIV under Mbeki

By Mia Malan for the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism• 25 March 2020

Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa. Photo composite supplied by Bhekisisa

Reporting on Covid-19 and HIV in South Africa is like night and day, says a writer who has reported on both epidemics.

It’s the day after the plane containing our repatriates from Wuhan has landed, when Cyril Ramaphosa declares a National State of Disaster in the country, in front of a blaring television in my lounge, when it hits me: Nowhere am I able to see a single activist venting vociferously against the government.

No Zackie Achmats, Fatima Hassans, Vuyiseka Dubulas, Edwin Camerons or Mark Heywoods standing firmly at the ready to contradict the President. No demonstrators spread-eagled across burning tar, playing dead alongside placards pleading for medicine and for the state to use evidence-based strategies to combat an epidemic.

No health minister screeching “Traitors!” at scientists and journalists who disagree with her denial of science and her refusal to provide people with life-saving treatment.

No pontifications about potatoes, beetroot, lemon and garlic as excellent means to protect people from a potentially fatal virus.

Instead we have a president taking responsibility, surrounded by his sober Cabinet, announcing: “It is up to us to determine how long [this epidemic] will last, how damaging it will be and how long it will take our economy and our country to recover.”

An Aids epidemic did not exist, the duo insisted

I was a young reporter when former President Thabo Mbeki and his Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, shocked the world when they denied the link between HIV and Aids.

The virus, they argued, was not the cause of Aids. An Aids epidemic did not, in fact, exist, the duo insisted; it was all down to poverty. They also posited a range of conspiracy theories, including that HIV was manufactured in a lab somewhere in the West.

It was a truly tumultuous point in the history of our then young democracy.
If you were a dedicated health journalist during the late 1990s or early 2000s, you were basically a full-time Aids reporter. You spent your workdays recording Mbeki’s and Tshabalala-Msimang’s quackish HIV statements, which you then took to credible scientists and activists to correct by way of contradictory comments.

That, of course, was, if you DID disagree with the government.

But there were some in the media who either agreed with the president and the health minister, or could not muster the courage to oppose them. It was all about politics, and power.

HIV had become a political football, and with political leaders suggesting that a condition, which was killing hundreds of thousands, was simultaneously a hoax and something that had been manufactured by a demonic pharmaceutical industry, the issue transcended the realm of health. That meant that political and business journalists, also often editors-in-chief, joined the debate – and they chose sides that were mostly determined by politics, not science.

There was confusion all round, with mixed messages the order of the day.
I know this to be so, because I worked for the state broadcaster at the time, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation was a fierce supporter of the Mbeki government. Like many of my colleagues, I had to fight to get my stories, which more often than not presented opinions and facts that contradicted the president, aired.
  
Against the background of South Africa’s hard-fought-for young democracy at the time, disagreement with the president – and in essence taking the side of Western science – about the cause of a condition that was destroying the country, was frequently viewed as anti-democratic and even racist.

So, journalists, scientists and activists who opposed HIV quackery were “anti-Mbeki people”, not just mere supporters of science.

We were the enemy.

‘Shut up and listen!’

At the first International Aids Conference that was held on South African soil, in 2000, in Durban, the animosity was on open display amid the grandeur of the five-star Hilton Hotel, when the health minister reprimanded two world-renowned HIV scientists whose research appeared regularly in prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Tshabalala-Msimang ordered Salim Abdool Karim, now the head of the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research, Caprisa, and Hoosen Coovadia, then from the University of Kwazulu-Natal, to a luxury room where she chastised them in front of Health MECs and other politicians.

Both were respected health activists who had fought for equal access to healthcare for all races during apartheid.

“You’re disloyal! Traitors!” Abdool Karim remembers her screaming at them. “What you are doing is equal to treason to our country!”

Their sin was that they had been publicly defending HIV as the cause of Aids and advocating for access to antiretroviral treatment (labelled “poisonous” by Tshabalala-Msimang) for HIV-positive  South Africans. 

But when the two scientists tried to defend themselves, Abdool Karim recalls, Thabalala-Msimang interrupted them and yelled: “Shut up and listen!”

HIV stories – and scientists themselves – were filled with conflict

Twenty years later, after a decade of State Capture, and on the brink of another epidemic – Covid-19 – Abdool Karim received a call from the current health minister, Zweli Mkhize.

Mkhize was seeking advice, asking the scientist: “How do you think we can slow the spread” of the new coronavirus, known as SARS-Cov-2.

Says Abdool Karim: “With the coronavirus, our experience with government is exactly the opposite [of what we endured during the Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang era]. The minister has been contacting us, he wants to involve us, he is seeking the opposite of what Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang wanted.”

Abool Karim serves on a special Covid-19 committee. It advises the president on what actions to take. “With HIV we were so slack with taking things up, we delayed mother-to-child-prevention of HIV and access to antiretroviral treatment. But with Covid-19 we’re proactive and we’re acting early,” he says.
The consequences – in the form of more than 300,000 unnecessary HIV-related deaths, according to a Harvard University study – of the time the government took to respond to science, are unfortunately permanent.

As a result of the government’s contrasting responses, reporting on HIV and Covid-19 in South Africa as a journalist is like night and day. With one of the epidemics, activists and scientists were mostly our only sources of information, and the government the ones who blocked access to data. In the case of HIV, study after study has shown how conflict – one of the strongest news values – was a central theme in stories on the subject because of activists and government being played off against each other; but it often resulted in stories being repetitive, rather than meaningful.

With Covid-19, those same HIV activists who fought the government are now supporting and praising Cyril Ramaphosa’s early, evidence-based interventions. And the health ministry, which previously cut journalists off, has set up a media WhatsApp group through which the latest figures, as they become available, are posted directly to journalists’ phones. The system isn’t perfect – press releases have been retracted a few times because they contained the wrong figures – but the point is: there is a system that allows for a free flow of information. And when mistakes are made, the government has acknowledged them.

There’s even a data-free website and a public WhatsApp service that has so far been used by well over 2 million people, according to the health department. 

Is the ANC using its great power for good with Covid-19?

And, it seems, the ANC is, at this moment in history, using its great power for good – for state protection rather than State Capture. When the ANC Youth League in Limpopo, for instance, threatened the “mother of all marches” in the province after it was announced that the quarantine site for the Wuhan repatriates was going to be in the outskirts of Polokwane, Zweli Mkhize — a powerful man in the ANC — shushed them and crushed their plans very swiftly.
After the Wuhan plane landed he took to his Twitter handle to post a video branded with an “ANC Limpopo” logo to welcome the repatriates.

The government has been calling the media its “partners” in the fight against Covid-19. To the ears of someone who reported on HIV in South Africa in the 1990s and 2000s, that has been pretty surreal. I’m sure the “partners” thing has seemed equally strange to those in the media who’ve been reporting on State Capture and government corruption.

Okay, enough Kumbaya for now: As a journalist and editor, I of course am well aware of how rapidly this newfound “partnership” could end. But for now, it’s happening. We’re all in it together, on the same side. For now, I’m witnessing true leadership from the ANC.

We can’t stop this virus from spreading, but we can slow down the pace at which it spreads, to help our health system cope.

We’re moving into lockdown, testing sites are increasing, there are contact tracing teams, quarantine sites-in-the-making and relatively good communication systems that will hopefully prevent panic.

Yet, sadly, the ANC government’s criminal inaction two decades ago is likely to have a bearing on South Africa’s ability to combat Covid-19 successfully: We now have one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, something that could have been prevented if we had put people on treatment earlier.

Our latest household survey shows that four out of 10 people with HIV are still not on treatment, which increases the chances that their immune systems are weak and potentially vulnerable to attacks from viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.
Lessons don’t emerge only from other countries. With regards to Covid-19 and our response in the coming weeks and months and maybe even years, our own history just may be our greatest teacher. DM

This story was first published by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism.
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As I am busy researching information for an obituary I am putting together about Cecil Williams, I came across this item from Peter Tatchell in which he makes reference to the connection between Cecil Williams and Nelson Mandela. The article contains an enormous amount of interesting information about the ANC, homophobia, and the people who worked to challenge and change the ANC's responses to the gay and lesbian communities. (Mannie De Saxe)

Peter Tatchell Foundation

Home » LGBT Rights » South Africa: How the ANC was won for LGBT rights

South Africa: How the ANC was won for LGBT rights

posted by Peter Tatchell ... on Tue, 19 APRIL 2016 

 

And how it came to protect LGBT South Africans against discrimination

By Peter Tatchell
London – 20 April 2016

This essay is dedicated to the many heroic South African LGBT and anti-apartheid activists that I worked with during the period of white minority rule - heroes who helped secure the commitment of the African National Congress of South Africa to LGBT human rights, including the enactment of the world’s first constitution to protect LGBT people against discrimination.

As a gay teenager growing up in Melbourne, Australia, my three great passions were men, surfing and politics. All three came together in the summer of 1971, when at the age of 19, I went on my first anti-apartheid protest. It was against the all-white South African Surf Life-Saving tour. At one of my favourite beaches, Lorne, on a blistering hot morning, 40 of us lay down on the sand in a bid to stop the South African team taking their boat out of the boathouse. We succeeded, for a while, making our symbolic point - before being battered and bloodied, and then carted off by the police. So began my two decades of activism against the apartheid regime: pickets, boycotts, marches and sit-ins.

Over those long years, I kept hearing disconcerting stories about homophobic attitudes within the African National Congress - the main liberation movement and the likely governing party of a post-apartheid South Africa. At the left-wing World Youth Festival in East Berlin in 1973, which I attended as a Gay Liberation Front delegate, there were reports of the victimisation of lesbian and gay ANC members, and warnings that queers would have a tough time when the ANC came to power.

Homophobia existed at high levels in the ANC, even though there was a long history of gay people being involved in the struggle against apartheid. The gay theatre director, Cecil Williams, was one such person. He played a key role in aiding Nelson Mandela when he was on the run from the police in the early 1960s. To enable Mandela to carry on his underground activism and avoid detection, Williams had Mandela disguise himself as his chauffeur.

Despite the contributions of courageous lesbian and gay people such as Cecil Williams, the ANC still had a de facto anti-gay policy or, at best, a stance of not supporting LGBT equality.

In those days, only a handful of anti-apartheid activists dared challenge the homophobia - and sexism - of the ANC leadership. There was a near-universal expectation that opposition to apartheid involved uncritical support for the liberation struggle. It was deemed betrayal to question the ANC. Criticism was unwelcome - even when it was constructive and came from friends and allies. We were told by the official Anti-Apartheid Movement that any doubts or concerns had to wait until the white supremacist system was overthrown.

Most anti-apartheid activists duly obliged. I was one of them. My fear was that speaking out would give comfort and succour to the white minority regime, and undermine support for the just cause of the ANC. Although I made my concerns known behind the scenes, publicly I remained silent.

In 1987, after nearly 20 years involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle, I felt unable to stay silent any longer. No movement for human liberation has a right to demand unconditional loyalty. Such a demand leads, inexorably, to collusion with injustice. It was, after all, the insistence on uncritical support that resulted in so many people on the left ignoring or excusing the terrible crimes of the Stalin and Mao eras.

True loyalty sometimes involves challenging friends concerning their own shortcomings and mistakes.
My worry was that unless leading members of the ANC were confronted over their homophobia, a post-apartheid ANC-ruled South Africa might pursue the same kind of anti-gay policies that were common in other revolutionary states, such as Cuba, the Soviet Union and China.

This was not an unreasonable fear. When battling to overthrow dictatorship and fascism, most ANC-style liberation movements talked about creating a society with social justice and human rights for all. But after liberation they usually enforced a heterosexist regime that left queers just as victimised - if not more so - than before. Would it be a liberation worthy of the name if a free South Africa perpetuated the homophobia of the apartheid state?

After trying to influence ANC attitudes privately without success, as had many other people before me, I concluded that the only way to change things was by publicly exposing the ANC's rejection of LGBT human rights. My calculation was that the subsequent uproar would embarrass the ANC leadership and this might precipitate its switch to a more gay-sympathetic policy.

Accordingly, in August 1987, on hearing that ANC executive member Ruth Mompati was visiting London to promote South Africa Women's Day, I devised a plan and requested an interview.

A courageous fighter against the apartheid regime, Mompati was one of the leaders of the biggest women's demonstration in South African history. In 1956, 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings - the seat of government in Pretoria - to protest at the extension of the notorious pass laws to women.

Most of my interview with Mompati was about the struggle for women's emancipation, and was duly published in Labour Weekly. But towards the end, I raised the issue of women's sexual emancipation - in particular the human rights of lesbians and their role in the struggle against apartheid. This provoked an astonishing outburst that reconfirmed all the previous horror stories that I had heard about ANC homophobia.

"I hope that in a liberated South Africa people will live a normal life", Mompati told me. "I emphasise the word normal ... Tell me, are lesbians and gays normal? No, it is not normal".

"I cannot even begin to understand why people want lesbian and gay rights. The gays have no problems. They have nice houses and plenty to eat. I don't see them suffering. No one is persecuting them ... We haven't heard about this problem in South Africa until recently. It seems to be fashionable in the West".
When asked her reaction to the formation of LGBT anti-apartheid organisations inside South Africa, Mompati insisted: "They are not doing the liberation struggle a favour by organising separately and campaigning for their rights. The (gay) issue is being brought up to take attention away from the main struggle against apartheid. These other problems can wait until later. They are red herrings".

Mompati justified the ANC's lack of policy on LGBT human rights with the riposte: "We don't have a policy on flower sellers either". While acknowledging that women have special problems and specific interests that need to be addressed by the ANC, she was adamant that "lesbians and gays do not".

Concerned to be fair, in case Mompati's views were unrepresentative of the ANC's position, I contacted its London office and spoke to the liberation movement's then chief representative in Britain, Solly Smith. He expressed similarly offensive opinions: "We don't have a policy. Lesbian and gay rights do not arise in the ANC. We cannot be diverted from our struggle by these issues. We believe in the majority being equal. These people (lesbians and gays) are in the minority. The majority must rule".

When asked if the ANC was opposed to discrimination against homosexuals and if an ANC-led government would repeal the anti-gay laws of the apartheid state, Smith replied: "I have no comment on that".
This was, to my knowledge, the first time anyone had recorded verbatim accounts of the homophobic attitudes of ANC leaders. I knew these quotes would cause the ANC grief and discomfort. But a bit of pain and short term damage was necessary, I reasoned, in order to overturn homophobia within the liberation movement.

Accordingly, my interviews with Ruth Mompati and Solly Smith were published in the London gay weekly newspaper, Capital Gay, on 18 September 1987, under the headline "ANC dashes hopes for gay rights in SA". As I expected, and hoped, Smith's and Mompati's homophobia provoked an outcry in LGBT and liberal circles – even among many anti-apartheid activists.

To globalise the pressure on the ANC, I then circulated my article for republication in the gay and anti-apartheid press world-wide, including South Africa. My aim was to get the ANC inundated with protests that would (hopefully) pressure it to confront the issue of homophobia and eventually to abandon its refusal to support LGBT equality.

My Capital Gay article did, thankfully, result in the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement internationally being deluged with letters of condemnation. People were appalled that a "liberation movement" like the ANC could be so ignorant, bigoted and intolerant. The ANC leadership was hugely embarrassed.

But embarrassing the ANC was not my goal; it was merely a means to an end. My objective was to win the ANC to the cause of LGBT human rights. I therefore devised a plan to offer the leadership a face-saving solution and a constructive way forward. This involved writing a private appeal to the ANC leadership in exile in Lusaka.

My letter, dated 12 October 1987, was addressed to Thabo Mbeki, then the ANC Director of Information. I chose him on the advice of exiled ANC contacts, David and Norma Kitson. They suggested he was the most liberal-minded of the ANC leaders and senior enough to be able to push for a radical rethink of official policy. My letter was challenging, but friendly and constructive. I argued that support for LGBT liberation was consistent with the principles of the ANC's Freedom Charter:

"Dear Thabo Mbeki,
... Given that the Freedom Charter embodies the principle of civil and human rights for all South Africans, surely those rights should also apply to lesbians and gays? And surely the ANC should be committed to removing all forms of discrimination and oppression in a liberated South Africa? ... To me, the fight against apartheid and the fight for lesbian and gay rights are part of the same fight for human rights.
Yours in comradeship and solidarity, Peter Tatchell".

When writing to Mbeki I also included a sheaf of my published articles about leading lesbian and gay anti-apartheid activists inside South Africa, including Simon Nkoli and Ivan Toms. Simon, a student activist, was a defendant in one of the great cause celebres of the 1980s, the Delmas Treason Trial. Ivan was a doctor who had won acclaim for his work in the Crossroads squatter camp in Cape Town and was active in the campaign against conscription (he was later jailed for refusing to serve in the army of apartheid).

This information about LGBT involvement in the struggle against apartheid was news to many members of the exiled ANC Executive, and apparently had considerable influence in swinging the vote in favour of a pro-LGBT stance.

My letter to Mbeki - following in wake of adverse publicity from my Capital Gay article and subsequent protests - had the desired effect. Within a few weeks, the ANC leadership in exile began a major reevaluation of its stance on LGBT issues. As a result of these internal debates, the ANC officially, for the first time, committed itself to support LGBT equality and human rights.

This new pro-gay rights ANC policy was publicly announced in a telegram to me from Thabo Mbeki, dated 24 November 1987. He wrote:

"Dear Peter,
... The ANC is indeed very firmly committed to removing all forms of discrimination and oppression in a liberated South Africa. You are correct to point this out. That commitment must surely extend to the protection of gay rights ... I would like to believe that that my colleagues, Solly Smith and Ruth Mompati, did not want to suggest in any way that a free South Africa would want to see gays discriminated against or subjected to any form of repression. As a movement, we are of the view that the sexual preferences of an individual are a private matter. We would not wish to compromise anybody's right to privacy ... and would therefore not wish to legislate or decree how people should conduct their private lives ... We would like to apologise for any misunderstanding that might have arisen over these issues ...
Yours in the common struggle, Thabo Mbeki". 

Mbeki's statement was not as strong and comprehensive as many of us would have liked, nor had it been agreed by a formal policy-making conference of the ANC. But it was, nevertheless, a watershed moment. The ANC leadership was publicly aligning itself with the struggle for LGBT emancipation. A first!

At Mbeki's own request, I communicated his letter to gay and anti-apartheid movements world-wide. I also sent a copy to members of South African lesbian and gay groups, such as the long-time lesbian anti-apartheid activists, Sheila Lapinsky and Julia Nicol of the Organisation of Lesbian & Gay Activists (OLGA), based in Cape Town. In addition, I forwarded copies to members of the United Democratic Front - the main anti-apartheid coalition inside South Africa.

Long before me, other people had pressured the ANC to change its homophobic stance, but none of them succeeded. It was, it seems, only the huge torrent of negative publicity generated by my Capital Gay article, and my challenging letter to Thabo Mbeki, that prompted the ANC's rethink. My intervention was, perhaps, merely the culmination of earlier efforts by others - the final straw that broke the camel's back. Maybe I was merely the catalyst for changes that had been in the making for a very long time. What is certain is that without the ANC and international anti-apartheid movements being flooded with howls of protest, my letter to Mbeki may have had no impact at all. Due credit must be given to the many people from all over the world who helped pressure the ANC.

Securing the ANC's official opposition to homophobic discrimination gave the struggle for LGBT emancipation inside South Africa new legitimacy and kudos. It was instrumental in helping persuade some individuals and organisations fighting the white minority regime - both within South Africa and in other countries - to embrace LGBT equality - or at least to not oppose it. By giving the cause of LGBT rights political credibility, the ANC's stance helped pave the way for the subsequent inclusion of a ban on sexual orientation discrimination in the post-apartheid constitution.

Outlawing sexuality discrimination in the post-apartheid constitution


Not long after the ANC came out for LGBT rights, exiled ANC leaders based in London began work on drafting a constitution for a free and democratic South Africa. In 1989, I contacted a member of this constitutional working party, Albie Sachs, at the University of London, urging him to include in the ANC's draft constitution a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation.

He was initially rather sceptical. So I provided a draft wording, backed up with examples of anti-discrimination statutes from various European countries, such as Denmark, France and the Netherlands. These countries had laws incorporating either comprehensive protection against discrimination or an explicit ban on discrimination on the grounds of sexuality. These concrete legal precedents apparently helped reassure Sachs, and later also helped convince others in the ANC leadership, that a ban on anti-gay discrimination was feasible and practical.

A little later, I sent my own suggested draft wording - together with samples of anti-discrimination laws from other countries - to LGBT groups inside South Africa (especially OLGA and GLOW - the Gay & Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand). I also arranged for them to write direct to Albie Sachs in London and to lobby the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front inside South Africa.

In December 1989, on my initiative, a meeting was held in London between Sachs and OLGA representatives, Derrick Fine and Niezhaam Sampson. They discussed OLGA's constitutional proposals face-to-face. This personal meeting helped to cement Sachs's backing for a constitutional clause prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. His support later helped win over other key people in the ANC leadership.

After the collapse of the apartheid regime and the unbanning of the ANC in February 1990, OLGA held meetings inside South Africa with senior ANC members, Frene Ginwala, Albie Sachs and Kader Asmal, all of whom expressed a positive attitude towards OLGA's constitutional proposals.

Sach's, in particular, continued to have contact with OLGA and other LGBT organisations to further develop the idea of LGBT rights as part of a broad human rights package within South Africa's new constitution. He did, however, warn OLGA that there was "no guarantee" that a majority in the ANC would endorse constitutional protection for LGBTs; an indication that sections of the liberation movement remained unsupportive or ambivalent on the issue of sexual orientation equality.

Undeterred, in September 1990, OLGA made an extensive submission to the ANC's Constitutional Committee, which was in charge of formulating the movement's draft Bill of Rights. This submission was supported by 11 other South African LGBT organisations, including GLOW. It proposed a Bill of Rights that would "protect the fundamental rights of all citizens" and guarantee "equal rights for all individuals, irrespective of race, colour, gender, creed or sexual orientation".

Simultaneously, OLGA, GLOW and other gay organisations used the ANC's previous endorsement of LGBT equality to lobby the United Democratic Front and other anti-apartheid groups within South Africa. This lobbying helped persuade prominent campaigners in some of these groups to back the inclusion of a constitutional ban on anti-gay discrimination.

These efforts had a successful outcome when, in November 1990, the publication of the ANC's draft post-apartheid constitution included an explicit prohibition on homophobic discrimination.

OLGA also developed and canvassed support for a specific and comprehensive Charter of Lesbian and Gay Rights. In 1993, this proposal won the endorsement of a national conference of LGBT organisations, which had been convened to forge a united campaign for constitutional protection.

The push for LGBT human rights was subsequently carried forward in the post-1994 period by a new umbrella organisation - the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE).

It is thanks to the efforts of these many far-sighted, determined and courageous LGBT people inside South Africa that constitutional rights for LGBTs were finally won; making the South African constitution the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation. Bravo!

THE POST-APARTHEID CONSTITUTION OF SOUTH AFRICA 

Chapter 2 - Bill of Rights 

Equality 

9.
(1) Everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law.

(2) Equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights freedoms. To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.

(3) The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.

(4) No person my unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds in terms of subsection (3). National legislation must be enacted to prevent or prohibit unfair discrimination.

(5) Discrimination on one or more of the grounds listed in subsection (3) is unfair unless it is established that the discrimination is fair.

Note: 

A version of this essay was published in South Africa under the title: The moment the ANC embraced gay rights, in the book, Sex and Politics in South Africa, Neville Hoad, Karen Martin and Graeme Reid (Editors), Double Storey Books, Cape Town, 2005

ENDS

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Trainspotter: The Madness of King Mbeki, HIV/AIDS edition

• Richard Poplak
• South Africa
• 07 Mar 2016  (South Africa) Daily Maverick

As you’re no doubt aware, former President Thabo Mbeki has been addressing his legacy in a series of letters published on his Foundation’s homepage. Interested South Africans wondered when he was going to get around to dealing with the most controversial aspect of his presidency? They should wonder no longer. Mbeki is still nuts about Aids. The first time, lots of people died unnecessarily. Now, it’s just pathetic. By RICHARD POPLAK.

Like most South Africans who trawl the Great Pacific garbage patch of South African politics for recyclables, I have a new Monday morning ritual. After breakfast, I reluctantly click my way to the Thabo Mbeki Foundation’s homepage, in search of a blinking icon emblazoned with the word “New.” There I find a portal into the past – or, rather, into an ever-evolving, always-under-construction historical theme park called Mbeki Land. The wilds of this place are inhabited by tin men, cackling witches, singing midgets and a menagerie of fantastical creatures, all of whom are presided over by a figure behind a curtain referred to by his minions as “The Prez.” Imagine the visitor’s disappointment when the curtain is pulled back to reveal Thabo Mbeki hunched in a chair, hammering away on – gasp! – a word processor.

For the several months, with Metamucil-like regularity, President Mbeki has published letters on his foundation’s website, all of which deal with some of the more controversial, if arcane, matters related to his term in office.

The following words were not written by Thabo Mbeki, but they provide an overview of his oeuvre, without subjecting the reader to the agony of an actual Mbeki letter:

Behind the issue of warm beverage consumption in parliament was a larger narrative.
For several decades, ever since I decided to step down from my position as president of the African National Congress, and therefore chose to entrust the country’s presidency to others within the one hundred (100) year-old party’s august ranks, the so-called “Issue of Mbeki and the Parliamentary Tearoom” has been hotly contested by the press and the historical fraternity. 

It has been said, by many in both institutions, that President Thabo Mbeki unilaterally chose to switch from Five Roses to Woolworths English Breakfast as the choice of tea bag to be consumed within the contextual space of the tea room, and that this choice reflected not only an uncomfortable closeness with the agents of white corporate power, in particular the grocery chain lobby, but also an unpleasant affinity with the English themselves, with whom President Mbeki had become close during his period in exile. 

Adv. Vusi Pikoli, who was at that time serving as head of the head National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP), was said by certain members of the press to have a strong and unwavering preference for Five Roses, and that he, and the Head of the Scorpions, Adv Leonard McCarthy, would strongly object to any attempts at removing the aforementioned tea bags from the tea room, and to replacing them with a superior brand. 

It is also said that when I tabled the issues of Woolworths English Breakfast’s marked superiority at a committee session during the ANC’s 1996 lekgotla, in particular focusing on the nutty aroma and cigar-smoke aftertaste inimical to the Five Roses varietal, Pikoli took copious notes, did not engage, and shortly thereafter began negotiating secretly with the Joko brand. But, as political correspondent Ranjeni Munusamy noted in a Standard 1 essay, written exclusively for Natal Catholic Girls Primary School in August 1987, and titled “What I did during my holidays”—“all is not what it seems.” 

The reader should now consider herself alerted to some signature Mbeki moves: the flip-flopping from first person to third; the convoluted, run-on sentences; the invocation of the long dead as standing witnesses. Wretched prose aside, the offense in these letters lurks within the minutia, within the endless attempts to “set straight” small points of contention while ignoring the larger implications of a billion tiny, ill-made decisions. As far as Thabo Mbeki is concerned, Thabo Mbeki never slipped up, and the country’s ills must be attributed to the tin men, cackling witches and singing midgets on the other side of the curtain.

But the most recent letter was a killer even by the former president’s standards. The issue that we’d all been dreading – Mbeki’s unforgivable policy decisions during the country’s HIV/Aids crisis – finally received its own rollercoaster ride in Mbeki Land. Entitled “A Brief Commentary on the Question of HIV and AIDS”, and published on Monday, it is – and I say this without reservation – the most absurd, tragic, turgid monstrosity that I have ever encountered on the internet. I repeat: On. The. Internet. Where idiocy goes to die. Where Donald Trump goes to Tweet. Where kitten GIFs count as high art.
 
There is, and always will be, a case to be made against the Western medical fraternity’s all-knowing arrogance, against Big Pharma’s endless rapacity, against the NGO industry’s warped, self- serving disease models, just as there’s a case to be made for respecting and venerating of traditional therapeutic methods. But Thabo Mbeki has never made the case for any of these with the proper rigour. In his most recent effort at white-washing his record, he kicks off with references to the first recorded incidences of HIV in Southern Africa, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the South African Medical Journal back in 1985. Insanely, the former president is referencing thirty-year-old medical research, which noted that the only locals to have contracted the virus were male homosexuals who recently visited the United States. He quotes this ancient data in order to suggest that there was something fishy about how the virus “mutated” into an equal opportunity murderer of heterosexual South Africans during the mid-90s. 

“Why is this special type of HI Virus confined only to our region of the world!” [Keen observers of the Mbeki’s epistolary form will note the exclamation point in lieu of a question mark. This is a recent development.] “Why does it not spread to other areas, even within Africa! What happened to the 1985 South African HI Virus which behaved in the same way as the US and West European HI Virus! If it mutated into what it is today, why did it not mutate in the same way in the US and Western Europe!”

Is this seriously happening! Is Thabo Mbeki going back to the mat on the “HI Virus” conspiracy in 20-freaking-16! (And just like that, the former president starts a grammar trend.)

Shortly before reminding us that he never actually said that HIV didn’t cause Aids, but rather stated that “a virus cannot cause a syndrome” – South Africa’s ranking post-apartheid moment of purest spoken bullshit – Mbeki defends alternate forms of therapy by quoting the interview one Professor Luc Montagnier gave in a What-Is-Aids-Really? conspiracy-doc called House of Numbers. (Montagnier, Mbeki takes pains to point out, is a Nobel laureate – but hey, so is FW de Klerk) I couldn’t make head nor tails of what the prof was mumbling in the documentary, and it makes even less sense transcribed into Mbeki-ese. Something about oxidative stress, and that treating or curing Aids (I’m not sure which) requires a more holistic approach, including a focus on genital hygiene for women, nutrition, and “building up the poor African's immune system.”

Nutrition, however, is a fancy word for food, and there’s a good reason the majority South Africans didn’t (and still don’t) have access to anything but junk staples. Mbeki, who more than any single South African has guided macro-economic policy since the fall of apartheid, contended with regime’s nightmare legacy by dressing up as Margaret Thatcher. He has now attempted to yoke “nutrition” to his reimagined holistic African First health policy. But access to decent, immune-system-building mega-cuisine really comes down to purchasing power—in other words, if you don’t have money, you eat bleached maize three times a day. Did Mbeki’s signature implemented economic policy, the staggeringly neoliberal GEAR, align with his fantastical unimplemented Aids policy? Did it allow poor South Africans to emerge from the chrysalis of transition into a spirulina and wheatgrass-sipping utopia? 

Not so much.
Which brings us, finally, to the weakest, dopiest and, I’d argue, criminally insipid argument of his most recent epistle—Mbeki’s Ludlum-esque Tuberculosis Supremacy. It goes like this: 
the World Powers, in order to peddle money-spinning ARVs to dumb Africans, all yelled “Aids!” as loudly as possible at the same time, and we were bamboozled into believing that tuberculosis, followed in succession by a bunch of other unsexy diseases, weren’t bigger killers than HIV/Aids. “Why,” Mbeki wants to know, “would the South African Government, knowing the health condition of its own population very well, have been expected so to focus on the 9^th leading cause of death as virtually to treat as less urgent and important the first eight (8) leading causes of death, even taken together?” [sic]

I don’t even know where to go with this one. How about here: the ANC government under Mbeki abandoned everyone from tuberculosis patients to schizophrenics by allowing the public health system to drift into dysfunction, helmed (or unhelmed) by the most unloved politician of the democratic era, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang – the only woman in history to enjoy the privilege of a burner liver. 

I’ve read the theories detailing Mbeki’s outlook on HIV/Aids, how deeply and personally he felt that the tub-thumping of a single disease was means of (once again) over-sexualizing and demeaning the black African body. But if the Aids crisis felt like just another ploy to recolonise Africa, it certainly didn’t tether us to the West anywhere near as much as GEAR’s preamble did. So there’s good re-colonisation and bad re-colonisation, and Mbeki got to pick which was which based on his personal shibboleths? But the kind of technocratic governance that Mbeki was known for preaching is by definition impersonal – you don’t get to sweat over your turn ons and turn offs when babies are dying. A health crisis requires a specific type of leadership, the type the Nigerians applied to the Ebola outbreak. In a country known for chaos, Abuja doubled-down on every piece of available scientific evidence and, poof, away the disease went. Mbeki’s job was to do everything – everything – possible to restrict the spread of any and every disease threatening the welfare of the South African people. If Big Pharma were fucking us in the process, that was a job for the ANC’s ten thousand Mercedes Benz-driving lawyers to sort out.

It gets worse, though. How does Mbeki end off this latest, lunatic zip around Mbeki Land? With a fascinating factoid: 

“The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill-health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the end of the International Classification of Diseases. It is given the code Z59.5 – extreme poverty.”

Well how about that? Did Mbeki’s policies, health or otherwise, deal with code Z59.5? Perhaps we’ll read about that in an upcoming letter, which in Mbeki Land means blaming poverty on poverty, while concentrating on the brand of tea bags and other tragic, sad-ass minutia. DM

Photo: A file photograph dated 10 February 2007 shows former South African President Thabo Mbeki addressing mourners at the funeral of African National Congress (ANC) stalwart Adelaide Tambo in Wattville, east of Johannesburg, South Africa. EPA/JON HRUSA.

• Richard Poplak
• South Africa

SOUTH AFRICA - ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THE BOMB EXPLODES!

Subject: Article by Moeletsi Mbeki (Thabo Mbeki's brother) - South Africa: Only a matter of time before the bomb explodes

South Africa: Only a matter of time before the bomb explodes

7 November 2011

by Moeletsi Mbeki: Author, political commentator and entrepreneur.


I can predict when SA's "Tunisia Day" will arrive. Tunisia Day is when the masses rise against the powers that be, as happened recently in Tunisia. The year will be 2020, give or take a couple of years. The year 2020 is when China estimates that its current minerals-intensive industrialisation phase will be concluded.

For SA, this will mean the African National Congress (ANC) government will have to cut back on social grants, which it uses to placate the black poor and to get their votes. China's current industrialisation phase has forced up the prices of SA's minerals, which has enabled the government to finance social welfare programmes. The ANC is currently making SA a welfare state and tends to 'forget' that there is only a minority that pay all the taxes.

They are often quick to say that if people (read whites) are not happy they should leave. The more people that leave, the more their tax base shrinks.

Yes, they will fill the positions with BEE candidates (read blacks), but if they are not capable of doing the job then the company will eventually fold as well as their 'new' tax base. When there is no more money available for handouts they will then have a problem because they are breeding a culture of handouts instead of creating jobs so people can gain an idea of the value of money. If you keep getting things for free then you lose the sense of its value. The current trend of saying if the west won't help then China will is going to bite them. China will want payment - ie land for their people and will result in an influx of Chinese (there is no such thing as a free lunch!)

The ANC inherited a flawed, complex society it barely understood; its tinkerings with it are turning it into an explosive cocktail. The ANC leaders are like a group of children playing with a hand grenade. One day one of them will figure out how to pull out the pin and everyone will be killed. .and 20 years on they still blame apartheid but have not done much to rectify things - changing names etc only costs money that could have been spent elsewhere.

A famous African liberation movement, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, after tinkering for 30 years, pulled the grenade pin by cancelling an election in 1991 that was won by the opposition Islamic Salvation Front.

In the civil war that ensued, 200,000 people were killed. The 'new' leaders are forgetting the 'struggle' heroes and the reasons for it - their agenda is now power and money and it suits them for the masses to be ignorant - same as Mugabe did in Zim. If you do not agree with the leaders then the followers intimidate you.

The former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, once commented that whoever thought that the ANC could rule SA was living in Cloud Cuckoo Land .
Why was Thatcher right? In the 16 years of ANC rule, all the symptoms of a government out of its depth have grown worse.

* Life expectancy has declined from 65 years to 53 years since the
ANC came to power; - a leader who did not believe that HIV causes AIDS
(Mbeki) and another who believes having a shower after unprotected sex is the answer and has 5 wives and recently a child out of wedlock (Zuma).
Great leaders for the masses to emulate!!- not!!

* In 2007, SA became a net food importer for the first time in its
history; Yet they want to carry on with their struggle song 'kill the boer(farmer)' and stopping farm killings does not seem to be a priority.
They do not seem to realise where food actually comes from.

* The elimination of agricultural subsidies by the government led to
the loss of 600000 farm workers' jobs and the eviction from the commercial farming sector of about 2,4-million people between 1997 and 2007; and - yet they want to create jobs and cause even more job losses - very
short-sighted thinking.

* The ANC stopped controlling the borders, leading to a flood of poor
people into SA, which has led to conflicts between SA's poor and foreign African migrants. Not much thought was given to this - their attitude was to help fellow Africans by allowing them 'refuge' in SA. Not thinking that illegals cannot legally get jobs but they need to eat to live. I believe that most of our crime is by non-South Africans from north of the borders.
They need to do something to survive! Remove the illegal problem and you
solve most of the crime problem.

.but is it in their interest to solve crime?

There are whole industries built on crime - each burglary, car hijacking etc results in more sales of product and contribute to GDP. What would sales be if crime was down? I do not believe that anyone has worked out how much electricity is consumed a day because of electric fencing and security lights at night. Reduce the need for this (crime) and Eksdom (Eskom) would probably have a power surplus. - or if they charged our African neighbours the correct rates at least make a decent profit to build more power stations.

What should the ANC have done, or be doing?

The answer is quite straightforward. When they took control of the government in 1994, ANC leaders should have: identified what SA's strengths were; identified what SA's weaknesses were; and decided how to use the strengths to minimise and/or rectify the weaknesses. Standard business principle - but they too busy enriching themselves. People who were in prison or were non-entities 20 years ago are now billionaires - how? BEE??

A wise government would have persuaded the skilled white and Indian population to devote some of their time - even an hour a week - to train the black and coloured population to raise their skill levels. This done by lots of NGO's but should have been more constructively done by the ruling party.

What the ANC did instead when it came to power was to identify what its leaders and supporters wanted. It then used SA's strengths to satisfy the short-term consumption demands of its supporters. In essence, this is what is called black economic empowerment (BEE). .and put people in positions they could not cope with making them look stupid where if they had the necessary grounding could have been good in the position at the right time.

You cannot 'create' a company CEO in a couple of years. It takes years of work starting at the bottom of the ladder - not in the middle. Only some things can be learnt in books - experience is the most important factor and this is not found in text books or university corridors.

BEE promotes a number of extremely negative socioeconomic trends in our country. It promotes a class of politicians dependent on big business and therefore promotes big business's interests in the upper echelons of government. Second, BEE promotes an anti-entrepreneurial culture among the black middle class by legitimising an environment of entitlement. Third, affirmative action, a subset of BEE, promotes incompetence (what I said above)and corruption in the public sector by using ruling party allegiance and connections as the criteria for entry and promotion in the public service, instead of having tough public service entry examinations. Nepotism is rife - jobs for friends and families who are nowhere near qualified - and then hire consultants to actually get the work done - at additional cost of course!

Let's see where BEE, as we know it today, actually comes from. I first came across the concept of BEE from a company, which no longer exists, called Sankor. Sankor was the industrial division of Sanlam and it invented the concept of BEE.

The first purpose of BEE was to create a buffer group among the black political class that would become an ally of big business in SA. This buffer group would use its newfound power as controllers of the government to protect the assets of big business.

The buffer group would also protect the modus operandi of big business and thereby maintain the status quo in which South African business operates.
That was the design of the big conglomerates.

Sanlam was soon followed by Anglo American. Sanlam established BEE vehicle Nail; Anglo established Real Africa, Johnnic and so forth. The conglomerates took their marginal assets, and gave them to politically influential black people, with the purpose, in my view, not to transform the economy but to create a black political class that is in alliance with the conglomerates and therefore wants to maintain the status quo of our economy and the way in which it operates.

But what is wrong with protecting SA's conglomerates?

Well, there are many things wrong with how conglomerates operate and how they have structured our economy.

* The economy has a strong built-in dependence on cheap labour; with
tight labour legislation they are preventing people from getting jobs. For some industries minimum wages are too high resulting in less people being employed. Because it is almost impossible to get rid of an incompetent employee without it costing lots of money in severance people rather do not employ - run on minimum with no incentive to grow the business - or alternatively automate. Result - more unemployment and employment of
illegals at more affordable wages.

* It has a strong built-in dependence on the exploitation of primary
resources;

* It is strongly unfavourable to the development of skills in our
general population; Gone are the days of the artisan - no more structured learning to be artisans over a period of time. Try to fast track everything resulting in little on the job experience to be able to do the job. That is why Eksdom has sub stations blowing up and catching fire - lack of skill and maintenance. A friend told me about 5 years that this would start happening after Tshwane (Pretoria) started qualifying
electrical engineers who were not up to standard.

* It has a strong bias towards importing technology and economic
solutions; and - at a higher cost

* It promotes inequality between citizens by creating a large,
marginalised underclass. Who depend on handouts that cannot be maintained into perpetuity.

Conglomerates are a vehicle, not for creating development in SA but for exploiting natural resources without creating in-depth, inclusive social and economic development, which is what SA needs. That is what is wrong with protecting conglomerates.

The second problem with the formula of BEE is that it does not create entrepreneurs. People do not develop necessary skills when being fast-tracked into a position and being given a free ride. You are taking political leaders and politically connected people and giving them assets which, in the first instance, they don't know how to manage. So you are not adding value. You are faced with the threat of undermining value by taking assets from people who were managing them and giving them to people who cannot manage them (what I said earlier above) BEE thus creates a class of idle rich ANC politicos.

My quarrel with BEE is that what the conglomerates are doing is developing a new culture in SA - not a culture of entrepreneurship, but an entitlement culture, whereby black people who want to go into business think that they should acquire assets free, and that somebody is there to make them rich, rather than that they should build enterprises from the ground. Agree!

But we cannot build black companies if what black entrepreneurs look forward to is the distribution of already existing assets from the conglomerates in return for becoming lobbyists for the conglomerates. All companies start from the bottom - when they are 'given' these businesses they are usually run into the ground because of inexperience. And when they are given loans to buy business the loans invariable are not repaid and the businesses go bankrupt.

The third worrying trend is that the ANC-controlled state has now internalised the BEE model. We are now seeing the state trying to implement the same model that the conglomerates developed.

What is the state distributing? It is distributing jobs to party faithful and social welfare to the poor (what I said in different words) This is a recipe for incompetence and corruption, both of which are endemic in SA.
This is what explains the service delivery upheavals that are becoming a normal part of our environment.

So what is the correct road SA should be travelling?

We all accept that a socialist model, along the lines of the Soviet Union, is not workable for SA today. The creation of a state-owned economy is not a formula that is an option for SA or for many parts of the world. Therefore, if we want to develop SA instead of shuffling pre-existing wealth, we have to create new entrepreneurs, and we need to support existing entrepreneurs to diversify into new economic sectors.

Make people work for their 'handouts' even if it means they must sweep the streets or clean a park - just do something instead of getting all for nothing. Guaranteed there will then be less queuing for handouts because they would then be working and in most instances they do not want to work - they want everything for nothing.

And in my opinion the ANC created this culture before the first election in
1994 when they promised the masses housing, electricity etc - they just neglected to tell them that they would have to pay for them. That is why the masses constantly do not want to pay for water, electricity, rates on their properties - they think the government must pay this - after all they were told by the ANC that they will be given these things - they just do not want to understand that the money to pay for this comes from somewhere and if you don't pay you will eventually not have these services.

And then when the tax base has left they can grow their mielies in front of their shack and stretch out their open palms to the UN for food handouts an live a day to day existence that seems to be what they want - sit on their arse and do nothing.

Mbeki is the author of Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing. This article forms part of a series on transformation supplied by the Centre for Development and Enterprise.