 |
TOBY SELANDER/GALBE.COM
MIKE CASSESE/REUTERS
|
) |
|
 |
|
With hundreds dying every day, the fight against AIDS is South Africa 's defining struggle. Because activist Zackie Achmat pushed President Thabo Mbeki to get serious about the crisis—and Mbeki did—they are TIME's African Newsmakers
South African president Thabo Mbeki would never admit it, but Zackie Achmat may be the toughest political opponent he's ever faced. For years after winning office in 1999, Mbeki seemed oddly reluctant to acknowledge the threat of aids in South Africa , a challenge his predecessor Nelson Mandela has called greater than the struggle against apartheid. More than 5.3 million South Africans—more than 1 in every 10 people—have HIV/AIDS, the highest number in any country in the world; at least 650 South Africans die of the disease every day. But Mbeki hindered the fight against the disease, first by questioning the well-accepted link between HIV and AIDS and then by resisting the use of life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs, which his Ministry of Health officials have called toxic and his office once likened to the "biological warfare of the apartheid era." Thankfully, South Africans have Achmat, a former anti-apartheid activist who discovered he was HIV positive in 1990 and later formed the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), now South Africa 's leading aids pressure group
In 1999 Achmat started a drug strike, refusing to take his own antiretroviral medications until they were available to all South Africans. Two years later his example, and fierce lobbying by the TAC, forced 39 major pharmaceutical firms to drop a legal challenge against a new South African law that allows the production and import of generic antiretroviral drugs. Despite the victory, Achmat knew he had an even tougher battle to fight: convincing his skeptical President that South Africans needed a national treatment program that included the use of antiretroviral drugs. Even as his health failed, Achmat's drug strike continued.
This year, Mbeki and his government finally saw the light. South Africa 's Ministry of Health announced in November a government-funded program that will eventually provide antiretroviral drugs to hundreds of thousands of people. South Africa will almost quadruple spending on HIV/AIDS over the next three years, upgrade the country's health system, train thousands of new medical personnel, mount new education programs and build a nationwide network of testing clinics, blood laboratories and drug-distribution points. The new program is "enormous," says Achmat, who began taking his drugs again in August after illness had forced him to cut back temporarily on his lobbying work and when it became obvious the government was moving to change its stance. "But there is still the anguish of knowing that people will continue to die. Now the hard work begins. The program has to go out to everybody. We need training of qualified nurses, pharmacists, counselors. We have to set up prevention tenfold."
There is also the question of leadership. The government may have changed its policies, but Mbeki's personal views on AIDS remain as bewildering as ever. Sometimes he gets it right; often he does not. On World aids Day he told South African veterans that the fight against aids was like a war. But just two months before the announcement of the new health program, Mbeki told a reporter that he personally knew no one with aids. And when more than 2 billion people around the world tuned in to watch Nelson Mandela's Nov. 29 AIDS benefit concert from Cape Town , Mbeki was conspicuous by his absence. Mbeki and Achmat have never met. If they did, says Achmat, "I would want to tell him that it is impossible to forget the pain that he has caused and it is difficult to forgive him for it. We're willing to do anything to make the antiretroviral rollout work. But not on the basis that all is forgotten. There are some things you can never forget."
Text by Simon Robinson. Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town
|
|
|
|
|
