CAPE TOWN, July 17 (AFP) - The Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town lambasted the South African government's implementation of its AIDS policies on Wednesday, and suggested that Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang step down.
"In our country we have one of the best AIDS policies, I am told," Archbishop, Njongonkulu Ndungane, who is the Anglican primate in South Africa, told journalists.
"What is needed is implementation. If somebody at the head is not willing to do this, then you must get somebody else who is going to drive this process.
"The more we dither, the more people die, and our health minister, if it is true that this is the case ... must look for another job."
His comments came in the midst of a row over a grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, the region worst-hit by HIV/AIDS, with a 33 percent prevalence rate among adults.
The activist Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) last week accused the government at the international AIDS conference in Barcelona, Spain, of having blocked the grant, and threatened Friday to bring an urgent court application to force the government to accept it. The opposition Democratic Alliance called for Tshabalala-Msimang to step down over the affair.
On Tuesday, the government announced it had accepted the grant, but would use it to benefit all nine provinces.
The archbishop said he feared the minister's decision could put the grant in jeopardy, a concern also raised by TAC and the opposition.
Provincial authorities in KwaZulu-Natal applied directly to the fund for a grant.
They later tried to retract, apparently under pressure from the national government, but the fund ignored this and hailed its application as one of the best it had received.
It has a strong focus on care and treatment as well as prevention, in contrast to the national government's focus on prevention.
The United Nations earlier this month put the infection rate among all adult South Africans at 20.1 percent. The government estimates that 4.74 million South Africans are HIV-positive (out of a population of 43 million) -- the highest number of any country in the world.
Last week the country's highest court ordered the state to provide the antiretroviral drug Nevirapine to pregnant women wherever possible, but Tshabalala-Msimang caused an outcry at the Barcelona conference when she reportedly told a journalist she would obey the ruling even though the court was forcing her to "poison" people.
Ndungane, who attended the Barcelona meeting, said: "We must eliminate the fear fuelled by misinformation and dithering about response and responsibility. We must unite in a stand for hope."
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