The Bay Area Reporter - November 2, 2000
S. Predrag

A recent poll revealed that support for President Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela in June 1999, had dropped from 71 percent in May to around 50 percent in August among those who believe he is doing a reasonable or good job.

According to many political analysts, Mbeki's doubts about the link between HIV and AIDS and his association with dissident AIDS scientists have contributed significantly to his fall in popularity.

A study published last week by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa said that 50 percent of the respondents "approved" or "strongly approved" of his work over the previous 12 months while 41 percent disapproved.

Significantly, according to the study, this is the first time that more than 10 percent of the respondents have insisted that HIV and AIDS should be a key government priority.

For one month (between July and August), IDASA researchers visited 550 randomly selected sites around South Africa where they conducted face-to-face interviews with a random, nationally representative sample of 2,200 South Africans.

Most South Africans are still most concerned with issues such as job creation (76 percent), crime (60 percent), housing (25 percent), and education (13 percent). But this time, HIV/AIDS (13 percent) and health (12 percent) came ahead of poverty (11 percent) and corruption (10 percent).

Faced with this decline in popularity, Mbeki has embarked on a "charm operation" which included his first open-ended news conference since he came to power and a massive advertising campaign to publicize his government's "back to basics" guidelines in the battle against HIV/AIDS.

Although Mbeki's government has introduced guidelines on AIDS treatment that recognize the link between HIV and AIDS, during a meeting with local and foreign journalists in Pretoria, he once again avoided answering whether he believed HIV causes AIDS.

At the press conference Mbeki also defended his appointment of a controversial advisory panel on AIDS, that includes U.S.-based scientists such as Peter Duesberg and David Resnick, who claim that the real cause of a lack of resistance to AIDS can be traced back to poverty, poor hygiene, underdevelopment, and common local diseases.

Instead of responding with a simple "yes" or "no" when asked if he believed that HIV causes AIDS, Mbeki stubbornly insisted that, "The questions we are asking are not idle. à They have to do with ensuring that as a government we respond correctly to the actual situation that we face."

At the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban in July, Mbeki claimed that, "We cannot blame everything on a single virus à but poverty is the underlying cause of reduced life expectancy, handicaps, disability, starvation, mental illnesses, stress, suicide, family disintegration, and substance abuse."

Recently, in parliament, Mbeki insisted that a "virus [HIV] cannot cause a syndrome [AIDS]" which was yet another symbolic nail in his political coffin because of his controversial viewpoint on AIDS.

Even his predecessor, Mandela, has told the media that he agreed with the "dominant opinion that prevails throughout the world" that HIV is the cause of AIDS. He advised Mbeki that, "I would like to be careful because for people in our position, when you take a stand, you might find that established principles are undermined, sometimes without scientific backing."

The Congress of South African Trade Unions, a leading labor federation, recently stated that, "The link between HIV and AIDS is irrefutable and any other approach is unscientific and unfortunately likely to confuse people."

The government's just-published "back to basics" guidelines, contained in nine booklets, are a step in the right direction to recognize that HIV causes AIDS, some activists said. Still, the booklets underline that abstinence from sex, faithfulness among partners, and the importance of using condoms remain priorities.

These guidelines were evidently designed to clear up any confusion among the South African public caused by Mbeki's controversial views on the cause of AIDS and to revive his dwindling popularity.

However, most AIDS activists have already dismissed the government's new "back to basics" guidelines in the battle against the disease as "fatally flawed" because some key anti-retroviral drugs, such as AZT, are still conspicuously absent from the government's strategy to prevent and treat HIV.

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