Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - November 11, 2007
Claire Keeton

"Tshabalala-Msimang articulated a policy that enabled him to step back, giving people a choice," Gevisser told the Sunday Times this weekend.

The writer said Mbeki's advisers and comrades forced him to withdraw from the Aids debate - which he found "very, very regrettable". He agreed to do so as long as people were presented with alternatives to antiretrovirals.

Gevisser's 892-page tome, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, confirms that Mbeki is still an Aids dissident and explores the reasons why. In June this year the President called Gevisser about Aids and sent him a document that defended "Aids-dissident logic, overlaid with a version of African nationalism". Gevisser said: "He wanted me to know incontrovertibly that he was still an Aids dissident."

Although he denied it to Gevisser, Mbeki is believed to have secretly authored the document, first released in March 2002 and now updated until August 2006 and almost twice as long.

Gevisser said Mbeki's quest for political self-determination became confused with his quest for self-determination in health - shared ironically by his antagonists in the Aids arena who also believed in leveraging control back from drug companies and doctors.

Urgent political priorities and polemical viewpoints by Mbeki trumped the emerging Aids epidemic in 2000, his biographer implied.

"Why was Mbeki susceptible to the Aids dissident position?" he asks. "The most compelling reason for me is the 'dream deferred'. You come home to liberate your people BUT as you do so, you are told the people you are leading to freedom are dying of illness and worse, that you are in some way responsible. The stigma around exiles (and HIV) was intense.

"I think this is a critical part in understanding why he is a dissident."

He describes how the Aids epidemic struck at a time when the ANC "had to deal with the transition, up against a plummeting rand, the constraints of the global economy, growing unemployment, a recalcitrant and ill-trained civil service, a deeply divided society, and the challenges of forging one 'rainbow nation' out of it. It was just too much - presented with all of this - to deal with the allegation that, at the same time, a virus had already infected millions of South Africans and was threatening to infect a whole lot more."

On the economic front, denouncing antiretrovirals as toxic gave Mbeki's government much stronger ground for refusing to give pregnant women, newborn babies and rape survivors the drugs than simply admitting that it couldn't afford to provide them.

"There was a big dispute over whether the state could afford to give antiretrovirals and those on the Left were using this to show how evil Gear was. The Aids dissident data was like a gift to Mbeki. He did not have to argue on economics but could argue on efficacy and toxicity," says Gevisser.

Furthermore, he could strike a blow at global capitalism by challenging Big Pharma on Aids drugs. "Mbeki had been accused of rolling over for international capitalism," said Gevisser. "But all his life he had been fighting against the fat cat. All that history, legacy and honour had to go somewhere and it went against Big Pharma."

Aids dissident views also complemented Mbeki's materialist interpretation of society.

"If we get Aids because we have too little (or too much, too quickly)," writes Gevisser, "then Mbeki's mission and the ANC's raison d'etre prevails, but if we are dying because we cannot control our primal urges, then Mbeki's own liberatory paradigm is shattered."

In addition, contesting the science around HIV/Aids gave Mbeki a chance to challenge the racial prejudices around African sexuality and health.

"Public health discourse has historically seen Africa as a reservoir of illness and black men as being pathologically oversexed ," Gevisser said.

"Globally, Afropessimism sees Africa as a swamp of illness going nowhere. Mbeki's mission is to counter this. This led him to question the scientific evidence about HIV."

Not only Mbeki's pro-Africa stance but also his identity as an African visionary required him to be one step ahead of his people, which the President believes he is on Aids.

"A prophet-in-the wilderness is expected to see trouble and find solutions before his people do," said Gevissser, highlighting Mbeki's strengths on this score. "He was proven right on negotiating with the boere and proven right that the ANC had to embrace the market. He believes he will proven right again."

But Gevisser described Mbeki's handling of the Aids " paradigm" as an obsession that "scratches the deepest mark against his presidency".

071111
ST071108