Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - September 30, 2005
An editorial in this newspaper 12 years ago warned that typhoid was "producing images of medieval horror". It went on: "There could not have been a clearer demonstration of how the urgency of the task of reconstruction and development can quickly overtake the political triumphs of democratisation."
Twelve years on, Delmas once again makes the same headlines. It is a double shame that a people's government, now without the money troubles it inherited from the profligate and corrupt former regime, should run an administration where "medieval horrors" are still commonplace.
As we said in 1993, the "triumphs of democratisation" mean little if people still die of socio-economic induced diseases such as typhoid, cholera or tuberculosis.
The warnings sounded in 1993 are as true for Delmas today. The people of Botleng and other areas where the dream of clean water and sanitation still look like a mirage, deserve better.
The people of Delmas do not care too much about which sphere of government and which water utility is ultimately responsible for them trusting that pure water uncontaminated by faecal matter flows from their taps.
For this to happen, it is important that politicians and technocrats get their act together soon: enough denial and buck-passing.
The people of Botleng deserve to tell anyone who asks that its name is Sesotho for "place of beauty" without sensing its cruel irony.
The four, or whatever is the true number of people who have succumbed to typhoid since the latest epidemic was pronounced, are any number too many. Eleven years into what is supposed to be a humane dispensation, nobody should be dying from typhoid, especially not those who live an hour's drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria. The democracy dividend must be declared now.
Not a shame, an honour
The government's spin doctors inevitably take on the mien of swaggering schoolyard toughs and the Department of Health's Sibani Mngadi is no exception: this week he levelled a broadside at the Congress of South African Trade Union's Zwelinzima Vavi, calling him a "TAC mouthpiece".
Mampara Mngadi should know that this is no shame but an honour. The Treatment Action Campaign, which held its second annual conference recently, deserves heralding and mimicking.
Its grassroots commonsense has helped to prod the government into a vaguely sensible direction on the treatment of Aids.
Without this organisation, which Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang's foot-soldier labelled an "anti-retroviral lobby group", Mngadi would ironically not have been able to boast that the government has managed to put 61 000 South Africans on to the life-saving drug regime.
It's a small number, compared with the need, but we would, arguably, still have been mired in denialism if it had not been for the TAC. And what Vavi said is quite correct: from denialism, President Thabo Mbeki and his health minister have slumped into something as dangerous -- a sullen silence on this most chilling of pandemics.
Numerous surveys released in the past fortnight reveal that South Africa's economic and development success is being dragged down by HIV and Aids. The generation that usually fuels an economy is dying; its children are being pushed into the underclass.
Yet, those who should be leading the fight against our biggest challenge continue to dabble with quack vitamin-purveyors and to preach the virtues of African potatoes instead of those of safe sex, effective treatment and community care.
In the Western Cape, Dr Mathias Rath, the vitamin salesman, is waging an aggressive sales campaign on the Cape Flats, notably in Khayelitsha. With the local chapter of the South African National Civics Organisation acting as its pimp, his foundation is persuading people with HIV to come off their drug regimes to take his vitamin cocktails.
Two patients have died, yet the government's Medicines Control Council as well as the health department refuse to act. Again, the TAC is the only organisation putting up a fight against this latest madness.
With its tactical mix of using the legal system and building up a formidable generation of (largely young black) activists, the TAC is carrying the torch, doing what a caring state should be. Long may it survive and may it corral many more mouthpieces into its stable.
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