Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - April 8, 2001

Now, months later, the panel - comprising dissident and orthodox AIDS scientists - has released its report, which, unsurprisingly, provides little that is new.

Those who believe that HIV causes AIDS reiterate this belief, while those who do not, parade their unorthodox views crassly, saying that HIV would disappear if testing were halted.

The damage that Mbeki has inflicted on South Africa extends further than dumping a costly report on the country.

The government's policy on fighting the pandemic has shuffled along since he first expressed doubts over HIV and AIDS.

How many South Africans have, over the past two years, read those doubts as truths, eschewing the use of condoms and the practice of safe sex because their President must know best?

What we need now is to put the Mbeki-inspired dithering behind us.

It would help if the President told us what he thinks of the report.

While the Minister of Health, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and the Minister in the Presidency, Essop Pahad, appeared before journalists to explain the key points of the 134-page report, the President has remained markedly silent.

The ministers said he had already had his say during a Cabinet discussion on the report.

But we, the people who do not sit in Cabinet, also want to know what the President said.

Is he still confused about the causal link between HIV and AIDS? Does he believe that addressing issues of poverty will automatically halt the spread of the disease? Is he satisfied with the outcome of the report compiled by his eminent scientists? Does he realise that, every time he makes contradictory statements about the disease, he sets back an entire country and its people?

Similarly, we need to know that the government is anxious and serious about providing treatment to HIV-positive pregnant women. We want more than once-off, isolated pilot studies.

South Africa needs Cabinet ministers who are not afraid to state their positions on the disease.

We want to know that mothers will not die knowing that they have left an inheritance of death to their babies simply because the government we have elected has dithered and been indecisive.

South Africans deserve a government that treats AIDS as a national priority.

We want leaders who will say that, while education and prevention are the cornerstones of slowing down the spread of the disease, they will do everything in their power to help those already living with it. And that means everyone, from pregnant women to orphans.

We want our leaders to say that they do not really believe what Mbeki's late spokesman, Parks Mankahlana, told the US magazine Science - that the government would not provide HIV-positive pregnant women with anti-retroviral treatment because there would be too many AIDS orphans to care for.

How does Mbeki sleep at night when he knows that thousands of SA women will give birth to babies who face a death sentence before their lives have even begun?

If our society is indeed under siege from a deadly enemy called AIDS, and if a general's mettle - or lack thereof - is indeed ultimately measured in the heat of combat, our general has fallen short.

He has not withstood the pressure. He has misjudged the enemy's advance. He has sown confusion in his own ranks.

He has shown a great flair for words but little real leadership on this matter. History may well judge him harshly.

Don't shoot the messenger

Speaking after this newspaper reported on the colourful history of ANC Chief Whip Tony Yengeni's 4x4, the chairman of Parliament's standing committee on public accounts, Gavin Woods, remarked that the story would give impetus to the lethargic investigation into the R43-billion arms deal.

This week, the heads of the agencies conducting the probe - the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, the Auditor-General, Shauket Fakie, and the Public Protector, Selby Baqwa - emerged to challenge this perception and to say that they hoped to report their findings to Parliament by July.

However, their harshest criticism was not meted out to those who are covering their tracks or refusing to cooperate with their inquiry, but to newspapers such as the Sunday Times, which they accused of harming the investigation by scaring off witnesses.

That is disingenuous. Witnesses who are so easily cowed by a report in a newspaper are unlikely to be of much use under cross-examination in the glare of the courtroom if the promise of prosecutions is ever realised.

Following the ANC's ham-handed removal of the Heath unit from this probe, Ngcuka, Fakie and Baqwa are as much on trial as those who are suspected of wrongdoing in connection with the arms deal.

Their performance this week did little to advance their cause.

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