Inter Press Service - September 17, 1999
Analysis by Lewis Machipisa

In a cartoon, 'The Post' depicted an African woman with a baby strapped to her back, who asked when passing a billboard announcing the meeting, "what did the previous 10 ICASA conferences achieve"?

Findings from research studies, and horrifying statistics which brought home the reality of the HIV/AIDS pandemic dominated much of the conference's deliberations.

But this was the 10th meeting of its kind, and still HIV/AIDS continues to ravage the continent.

By the time the curtain came down on the 11th ICASA on Sep. 16, some 80,000 people may have been infected with HIV. Since the first ICASA conference in 1985, millions of Africans have died of AIDS. Of the 16,000 new infections every day, 11,000 are Africans.

And the numbers keeps rising daily. Of the nearly 34 million children and adults living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 1998, almost 23 million were in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This week's ICASA conference in the Zambian capital of Lusaka, closed with an unanimous call for African leaders to stop paying lip service to the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Not a single African leader attended the five-day meeting, including the host president, Fredrick Chiluba. Peter Piot, UNAIDS Executive Director, and Ebrahim Samba, Director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Africa Region, and almost all the 5,000 delegates who attended the meeting, publicly expressed their anger over the leaders no-show.

By the time the 12th edition of ICASA will be held in Burkina Faso in 2001, experts hope that the figures and stories will be different.

But this change will only occur if resources are diverted from wars in Africa to ensuring that people are guaranteed basic human rights, like the right to health.

According to the Zimbabwean Health Minister, Timothy Stamps, "a lot of money has been wasted in the name of efforts to curb the spread of AIDS".

Stamps told the media that "conferences in the name of AIDS are largely history of what people have done, some of it not so well documented and presented." The Zimbabwean health minister also said that often meetings like ICASA, offer a platform for drug companies from the developed world to sell their products.

Stamps lamented the fact that there was no reference during ICASA to how to address the huge disparities in trade and economic development between the developed world and Africa, which have had an impact on Africa's capacity to fight HIV/AIDS.

Reducing the divide would mean an improvement in the living standards of our people, he said.

Zambian Health Minister Nkandu Luo echoed this view.

"Now we are being hindered by the high debt stock Africa owes the West. My country, for example, is spending a lot of money in servicing this debt. We could have used this money on fighting AIDS," Luo told the media.

According to the Ethiopia-based United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), under any sensible growth-oriented macroeconomic scenario, Africa's debt is non-payable and unsustainable in many countries.

Freedom from debt could be the most effective way to achieve sustainable development in Africa. As a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and of export earnings, Africa's debt of 350 billion U.S. dollars in 1998 is the highest of any developing region.

Although the World Bank and UNAIDS announced in Lusaka that they will commit three billion U.S. dollars worth of resources annually to fight the epidemic, the amount falls far short of the 250 billion U.S. dollars needed in Africa each year to begin to combat HIV/AIDS.

Also, ironically, it has been the Bank's structural adjustment programmes in most developing countries which have destroyed the development support structures.

Spending on health has been drastically reduced at a time when HIV/AIDS is at its peak.

In South Africa, for example, it is estimated that the costs of treating HIV/AIDS will consume between 18 and 40 percent of total health expenditures. Annually, every HIV infected person would need to pay about 12,000 U.S. dollars every year on medicines alone, at a time when the health budgets of most African countries can only allocate no more than 10 dollars to be spent on the health of each person.

"There is no transparency in most African countries when it comes to AIDS funds... Governments lack the political will and commitment regarding this life threatening disaster," said Moustapha Gueye, director of the African Council of AIDS, Service Organisation (AfriCASO).

"Governments in Africa do not listen. They are in power and want to remain in power but they are doing nothing to seriously fight AIDS," said Gueye. (END/IPS/lm/pm/99)
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