Dorothy-Grace Guerrero and Firoze Manji (ed) (2008) China’s New Role in Africa and the South: A search for a new perspective. 
Current Issue
Pambazuka News 368: Why South Africa will never be like Zimbabwe
The authoritative electronic weekly newsletter and platform for social justice in Africa
Pambazuka News (English edition): ISSN 1753-6839
With nearly 500 contributors and an estimated 500,000 readers Pambazuka News is the authoritative pan African electronic weekly newsletter and platform for social justice in Africa providing cutting edge commentary and in-depth analysis on politics and current affairs, development, human rights, refugees, gender issues and culture in Africa.
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CONTENTS: 1. Announcements, 2. Features, 3. Comment & analysis, 4. Pan-African Postcard, 5. Letters
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Highlights from this issue
ANNOUNCEMENTS: Call for examples of locally owned food enterprises
FEATURES: Jeremy Cronin on why South Africa will not follow Zimbabwe
COMMENTS & ANALYSIS:
-Death threats against Wamba dia Wamba
- Maxwell V Madzikanga on why Zimbabwe belongs to all
- Agustin Velloso on AIDS, Equatorial Guinea and AIDS
- William Gumede on Mbeki and AIDS - Part IV
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Bill Fletcher on the United States and Somalia
LETTERS: Readers' comments and announcements
Announcements
Gates and Kellogg Foundations - Call for Submissions
2008-05-04
Wallace Center
As part of a new project jointly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Wallace Center at Winrock International (www.wallacecenter.org <http://www.wallacecenter.org/> ) is seeking innovative examples of locally owned food enterprises, and we need your help.
Our new initiative, Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace, will analyse and present 24 cutting-edge models of local food enterprises from around the world. If you know of non-US examples of community-based or local food enterprises, please contact Cari Beth Head at cbhead@winrock.org, or visit our project site for additional information, case study criteria, and the full press release by clicking here.
You may also sign up here to receive email updates as the project progresses.
Features
Why South Africa will never be like Zimbabwe
2008-05-05
Jeremy Cronin
In this Chris Hani Memorial Lecture, Jeremy Cronin traces the differences between the ANC and Zanu-PF as liberation movements and as parties in power. He argues that while Zanu-PF succeeded in demobilising a militant population the ANC did not, and as a result the ANC is being held in check by the people of South Africa.
Our government’s stand on Zimbabwe has once again distressed many South Africans. How can President Thabo Mbeki say there is no crisis in Zimbabwe? He later claimed he was not talking about the social and economic reality but about the elections in Zimbabwe. But isn’t there an electoral crisis?
If this denial were a one-off oversight on President Mbeki’s part then it would only be opposition parties here in South Africa and those not in solidarity with the Zimbabwean people who would want to go on making a meal of it. Unfortunately the denial was part of an entrenched pattern. In his state of the nation address in February Mbeki assured parliament that everything was ‘on track’ in Zimbabwe apart from a ‘few procedural matters’. This is not to say that absolutely nothing was achieved in the current round of mediation, which managed to edge the Zanu-PF government into a half-hearted and belated implementation of some of the agreements reached. These helped to place a few more tripwires against the dangers of brazen electoral fraud. For instance, results were posted outside polling stations, and for a few weeks opposition parties had access to rural areas.
But, as several other commentators have remarked, what are we to make of apologists who extol the mediation efforts and point to the access enjoyed by the opposition in this election to areas that had previously been no-go zones? If they were previously no-go zones, why did our own government and SADC declare the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2005 sufficiently free and fair? How do we explain this pattern of denial by our government?
Many commentators suggest that it is fundamentally about solidarity between national liberation movements. This is probably true, but it requires considerable qualification. In the first place, the ANC and Zanu-PF hardly enjoyed cordial relations in the decade and a half before Zimbabwe’s independence. The ANC’s Zimbabwean ally was Zapu. MK and Zipra forces fought together in the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns. After independence, Zapu’s mass base and forces in Matabeleland were dealt a brutal blow in 1985 in a scorched earth campaign that left some 20,000 people dead. A badly mauled Zapu was forced as a junior partner into a ‘government of national unity’ (one reason why many Zimbabweans have a distaste for the words, if not the reality, of a government of national unity).
Notwithstanding all of this, I believe that what informs much of President Mbeki’s Zimbabwean strategy is the belief that national liberation movements in our region should close ranks. This is informed by a conviction that the crisis in Zimbabwe is being used as an entry point by imperialist powers to reassert hegemony over a former colony and eventually over our whole region. Well, of course, all kinds of forces will seek to exploit the crisis in Zimbabwe, but attributing the crisis itself to imperialism is exactly what Mugabe himself does constantly. Of course, Mbeki will never say this as stridently as Mugabe. In fact, he hardly ever mentions the words anti-imperialism, and perhaps for good reason. How then would you explain yourself to your various presidential expert panels on investment, IT, and so on, which bristle with chief executives from all of the largest multinationals? Is this perhaps another reason why quiet diplomacy has to be quiet?
For his part, Mugabe blatantly uses the British colonial threat in an entirely demagogic and increasingly futile attempt to distract Zimbabweans from the failures and brutality of his own government. We are told, for instance, that ‘land reform’ did not succeed because the British failed to meet their financial obligations as agreed in the Lancaster House negotiations. But what kind of heroic anti-imperialist liberation movement is this? Can you imagine the Cubans arguing two decades after their revolutionary breakthrough that they had not implemented land reform because the US refused to subsidise it? President Mugabe’s demagogic ‘anti-imperialism’ is not an anti-imperialism that seeks to defend the interests of the peasantry, the workers (insofar as any remain employed) and the progressive professional and middle strata of Zimbabwe’s society (and indeed of our region). It is a pseudo anti-imperialism that seeks to defend the narrow interests of a rentier capitalist elite within Zanu-PF and the upper echelons of the state. It is a stratum that is entirely parasitic on state power. State power is used to pillage for the purposes of primitive accumulation. And remember, much of the recent socio-economic crisis in Zimbabwe dates back to the pillaging ‘peace mission’ to the DRC in the mid-1990s, which ended in bankruptcy and defeat for a once professional and proud Zimbabwean army.
State power also insulates the ruling class from the worst of the crisis they have provoked. And because access to state power rather than productive activity is the basis of its accumulation, state power is not something that will easily be surrendered or even shared, no matter how many doses of quiet diplomacy or rounds of elections.
As South Africans, and especially as ANC members, what lessons can we learn from all of this? There are many factors that make the ANC a very different national liberation movement from Zanu-PF. Just a few weeks before the ANC’s Polokwane national conference, Zanu-PF also held a national conference. In sharp contrast to Polokwane, the Zanu-PF conference was a thoroughly orchestrated, top-down affair. The organisational report, for instance, was not discussed; it was not even distributed to delegates. A copy was held up on the podium. ‘Here is the organisational report. Does conference adopt it? Thank you very much.’ South Africans are, of course, no more inherently democratic than Zimbabweans. However, there are various factors that we need to appreciate. As a much older organisation, the ANC developed strong ideological and culturally pluralistic traditions, with progressive liberal, radical democratic and socialist currents. By contrast, Zanu-PF in its first decades was almost entirely shaped by a bitter military struggle and its politics (like the MDC’s) are still strongly marked by ethnicity.
In the 1970s the overwhelming majority of Zimbabweans were peasants and almost half of Rhodesia’s territory was tribal trust land. This contrasts with the scattered and miniscule 13% of land reserved for Africans in apartheid South Africa. This is the secret behind the relative success of the Zimbabwean guerrilla struggle, especially in the Eastern Highlands. It is also why, in contrast, our own guerrilla struggle seldom got beyond the armed propaganda phase.
In contrast to most Third World liberation struggles in the 20th century, the epicentre of the South African struggle was the township (both rural and urban), the university campus, the factory shop floor, the faith community and the newsroom. None of this means that South Africans are immune to the ruling party stagnation and bureaucratisation that we have seen in Zimbabwe or, for that matter, and in a somewhat different context, in the communist parties of the former Soviet bloc. But after independence in Zimbabwe, the mass base of the liberation struggle was demobilised back to a remote countryside while its leadership became cabinet ministers and generals.
In South Africa, while there may well have been attempts to demobilise the mass base of struggle after 1994, this is less easy when dealing with trade unions, alliance partners, students and youth, a robust media, faith-based campaigns, women’s organisations and much more. Demobilisation is especially complicated if these forces are not in opposition but are rather your own core mass base. Polokwane was a complex event, but beneath it all was, I believe, a strong reaffirmation of these democratic, mass-based, pluralistic traditions in our movement. They are our key antidote to ‘Zanufication’.
*Jeremy Cronin is the SACP Deputy General-Secretary. This is a Chris Hani memorial lecture delivered in Durban on 4 May 2008.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Comment & analysis
Assassination threat against Wamba dia Wamba and Kiakwama
2008-05-06
Ota Benga Alliance
Within the context of an elusive peace in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo and an ongoing assault by the government against the fundamental rights of the people of the Lower Congo Region, it has come to our attention that Professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba and the Honorable Deputy Kiakwama have been targeted for assassination.
Both individuals have been actively defending the rights of the people of the Lower Congo to express themselves freely. They, like many other Congolese from other regions of the country, have condemned the wanton violence of government police forces against members of the Bundu dia Kongo (BdK), a movement for the cultural and spiritual emancipation of the Congo people. They have condemned the manner in which, since February 2008, brutal repression has led to the deaths of innocent people, including infants and older people. BdK is working to find a way for all sides to come together, so that a healing process can be initiated.
Ota Benga Alliance for Peace, Healing and Dignity calls on the DRC government to protect Wamba dia Wamba and Deputy Kiakwama from threatened assassinations.
If the information regarding the threats against the lives of Professor Wamba dia Wamba and Deputy Kiakwama is correct, we call on all those in the government who are directly and indirectly responsible for the maintenance of safety and peace for all Congolese citizens to do everything in their power to prevent the execution of such a plan.
Should the above threat against the lives of Prof Ernest Wamba dia Wamba and Honorable Kiakwama take place, we shall hold the government of the DRC responsible and accountable, and do all that is necessary to ensure that the institutions and/or individuals are brought to justice.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Zimbabwe: I refuse to be silent
2008-05-04
Maxwell V Madzikanga
In this plea, Maxwell V Madzikanga argues that Zimbabwe belongs to the many ‘courageous daughters and sons of Zimbabwe who in their prime paid the ultimate price in the inaugural Chinhoyi battle, in Tanzania, Nyadzonya, Chimoio and Tembwe, and across the breadth of Zimbabwe during the war for liberation.’
I read about the situation in Zimbabwe and saw images of what is happening there in the 23 April edition of the Zimbabwean newspaper. l cannot continue to betray my country by keeping silent on the need for total respect of human rights and human dignity in Zimbabwe. The reports and pictures show the extent of the shocking degradation of our humanity as peace-loving and civilised Zimbabweans. I feel that this enjoins me to visit a number of historical and current issues relating to the situation in Zimbabwe.
The UN must intervene immediately and comprehensively in Zimbabwe rather than holding meetings as if everything is okay. It does not help for the UN and world leaders to sit around gold-plated tables and diamond-coated chairs, sipping wine and salivating for and savouring fat cheques of per diem allowances while Zimbabwe goes up in smoke, burning the dried remnants of humanity. Hiding behind diplomatic nuances does not help either; the situation in Zimbabwe is a crisis of unimaginable proportions. The position taken by President Thabo Mbeki is very disheartening. The call that he step down as mediator in the crisis is valid. President Mbeki has let Zimbabweans down over the last two years of ‘quiet diplomacy’. I am, however, quite encouraged by the mature and courageous (albeit unpopular) comments made by the ANC President, Jacob Zuma. These are words for progress and for the future, not just for South Africa but for Zimbabwe, SADC and Africa as a whole.
Zimbabwe does not and will never belong to Morgan Tsvangirai; Robert Mugabe will never own Zimbabwe’s title deeds. This sacrosanct country belongs to our forefathers, to ourselves, and to future generations. Our forefathers had a deep respect for human rights that is reflected in our culture, traditions and customs. They worshipped the sanctity of human life and dignity in every aspect of our society. They were noble people who understood that leadership is not a lifetime calling but a duty and responsibility that had to be cherished and perfected for passing on to subsequent generations. So why are our current leaders refusing to acknowledge this, and to play their part in upholding our age-old democracy in Zimbabwe?
Zimbabwe belongs to those many fine and courageous daughters and sons of Zimbabwe who in their prime paid the ultimate price in the inaugural Chinhoyi battle, in Tanzania, Nyadzonya, Chimoio and Tembwe, and across the breadth of Zimbabwe during the war for liberation, majority rule and human rights. Zimbabwe belongs to all of us Zimbabweans. It is our duty to uphold values of life and dignity and responsible leadership for our generation and for generations to come. None of us owns these values. We are custodians and conduits for the evolution of the history of our people from the last to the next generation.
There is no justification for inflicting the amount of fear, pain, and injury on innocent women, men, grandmothers, grandfathers, girls and boys that has been witnessed in Chiwundura, Musana, Murehwa or Zvimba communal areas simply because they voted for MDC or Zanu-PF. Every Zimbabwean who has attained the age of suffrage has the constitutional right and freedom to select representatives and leaders of their preference without fear of reprisal whether before, during or after the election process. Zimbabwe belongs to the many invisible millions who should exercise their right to vote freely and to live dignified lives. Unfortunately our leaders do not see this, beyond political rhetoric.
The leadership in SADC in general has been a great disappointment. Despite isolated utterances, very little has come by way of tangible action, making all the regional initiatives ineffective. There is a clear need for more action, openness and courage from SADC, otherwise Zimbabwe will continue to bleed socially and economically – but not because Gordon Brown is tightening his grip on Zimbabwe. Harare is burning because we have turned against each other, torched our beautiful home, maimed innocent villagers and killed for no justifiable cause. We have turned Zimbabwe into a land of mourning, fear and uncertainty where painful, unnecessary and undignified death has become an ever-attendant reality.
Torture in all its forms is an abomination to human existence, whether perpetrated by the military, war veterans, Zanu-PF or MDC. A day of reckoning will come when all human rights violators will be called to account. Running to the east or flying to the west will not help. Going down into the abyss will not save the perpetrators from inevitable justice. This resonates with Zimbabwe’s culture, traditions, and beliefs, according to which no crime can be concealed forever, the truth will always out, and justice will be served. Zimbabweans are intricately bound by blood, tradition, ethos, totem, region, history and race. To decimate such a rich and strong heritage is an unforgivable crime; it is anti-Zimbabwe. Our children should be able to admire and be proud of the beauty of our land. Every citizen should be able to cross the breadth and explore the depth of our beautiful country without fearing the cruelty and harm now associated with the darkness. Zimbabwe’s youth should be able to hold hands in the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood and enjoy bright prospects for their future.
Zimbabwe’s schools need to function again and achieve the high standards and reputation that they are capable of attaining and so richly deserve. The health system needs to be rejuvenated to deliver effective, equitable and sustainable services for all citizens in urban and rural areas. The clergy and worshippers of all persuasions should be able to worship in genuine peace and security. The army, police and other security agencies should carry out their roles professionally and impartially. One should be able to stand under and salute the Zimbabwean flag in the full knowledge and confidence that it represents the sovereignty of the country, and that all our political leaders respect and value this sovereignty and conduct their duties with integrity. Our economy should be resuscitated so that prosperity starts flowing through its arteries and veins again. Our rivers should flow with freedom and life. That to me is what our people are asking for from their political leaders, not the violence and abuse of human rights that resulted from the March elections.
I cannot underscore the importance and significance of breathing life back into all spheres of Zimbabwean society, a society l love and am attached to so deeply. My father was tortured for a long period during the liberation struggle. As he lies in his grave, I wonder what he makes of the Zimbabwe of today. I guess one question he would ask is whether it was worth his suffering for the liberation of the country. Josiah Magama Tongogara, the late freedom fighter, famously implored the liberation military wings to return home and rebuild Zimbabwe when the war was won. What happened to the liberation slogan ‘we are our own liberators’ that we chanted from an early age? Do our leaders now want us to be liberated from ourselves? We must always cherish our liberation from oppression and tyranny.
I write with passion because the situation in Zimbabwe tortures me and l cannot remain silent. Nor can I be silenced. Our leadership has made glaring mistakes and continues to act as if they own our people, as if only they can and will determine our people’s destiny. They continue to transact hatred and hate speech. They continue to grandstand, whether from the safety of exile or of government.
We need a new Zimbabwe: a Zimbabwe that upholds basic and fundamental human rights, a Zimbabwe that reflects on its past and present experiences with wise counsel, a Zimbabwe that breathes life into the future, a Zimbabwe that values the life and dignity of the poor, impoverished and marginalised members of its society.
Zimbabwe deserves a visionary leadership that carries out its role of national stewardship – a leadership that can swallow its pride and say, ‘Morgan, you are my brother. I know we have fought for supremacy in the past, but our people are bleeding. For their sake let us sit together at the table of brotherhood and plan for the future of our beloved country.’ A leadership that can swallow its pride and hatred and say, ‘Robert, you are my brother. I know we have fought viciously and bitterly for dominance and caused suffering to our people because we neglected our responsibilities as leaders. Let us sit down as brothers, put our differences in the past and create a legacy for future generations – a legacy for them to cherish and be proud of, a legacy that will make our country a great nation again.’ Zimbabwe deserves a leadership that acts with humility, courage, honesty and wisdom – a leadership that is God-fearing and peace-loving and that identifies with the suffering, wounded and dying. Are our leaders suggesting that these values are beyond them?
We all love our beautiful country. Let us all play our part in accepting the mistakes we have made and start rebuilding the ruins. We must negotiate with sincerity, persuade honestly, pray humbly, advocate with conviction, live our daily lives with integrity and honour and treat our sisters and brothers with fairness and compassion. If we don’t, there will be a Zimbabwe that we will neither be proud to talk about nor identify with. Let us remember that this is not about Thabo Mbeki declaring that Zimbabwe is crisis-free, or Levy Mwanawasa, Kofi Annan and Gordon Brown declaring that the crisis exists. It is about Zimbabweans, with the support of the international community, standing up and saying that the current Zimbabwe is not what we as Zimbabweans want or yearn for – that we as Zimbabweans long for a genuinely free, peaceful and prosperous Zimbabwe where all its citizens are respected and can live in dignity.
I would like to end by calling on the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to execute its mandate fully and impartially. Sooner or later the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission will be called to collective and individual account for the deeds it has done. It is not too late to avert total erosion of the trust placed in this august body by the people of Zimbabwe.
In conclusion, let us not tire in seeking justice, freedom and prosperity for our country, and in seeking to serve our country with commitment and integrity. Zimbabwe belongs to the dead and the living, to you and to me, but more importantly to the ‘invisibles’ among us and to posterity.
*Maxwell V Madzikanga is a senior HIV/AIDS and human rights researcher at the Human Rights Centre, Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
AIDS and Spain's contradictions in Equatorial Guinea
2008-05-05
Agustin Velloso
As the people of Equatorial Guinea continue to die from AIDS and other diseases, Agustin Velloso highlights the fact that the elite in power receive their medical care abroad. Spain, one of the country's more important trading partners, turns a blind eye to Equatorial Guinea's corrupt health-care industry.
In Madrid at the end of October 2007, President Zapatero promised to give 0.7% of GDP for development aid during workshops promoted by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and presided over by Queen Sofía. As he did so, a boy we can call Miguel, sick with AIDS in Equatorial Guinea, lay dying in his mother's arms in the hospital in Malabo, the country's capital.
One of the objectives of the AECID is to train doctors in Equatorial Guinea to treat AIDS and to advise their clinical work with AIDS patients. So one is not dealing with witchdoctors here but doctors trained by the AECID. Yet they gave Miguel an extract of tree bark rather than the internationally recognised treatment, antiretrovirals. Antiretrovirals are available in Equatorial Guinea; international agencies donate them.
The reason Miguel did not receive the right treatment is corruption by the people responsible for caring for his health. According to ASODEGUE, the Association for Democratic Solidarity with Equatorial Guinea, the prime minister called a meeting several months ago of the national coordinators of the campaign against AIDS and of international agencies working in the country. Among them were delegates from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and AECID's experts who advise Equatorial Guinea's health ministry. A niece of President Obiang also took part. She is not a doctor but a businesswoman. She presented the meeting's participants with a project to produce the bark extract (called Fagaricine) to market as an AIDS treatment. She also asked their opinion about the project.
In its January 2008 Republic of Congo WHO Office Information Bulletin, the WHO notes ‘Fagaricine is not an AIDS drug’[1]. Whatever the experts’ opinion may have been, a tragedy took place shortly afterwards when a group of patients, including Miguel, attended their routine appointments in Malabo hospital to collect their antiretrovirals. Instead, they received Fagaricine. This group of guinea pigs included children and adults and at least one expectant mother. No explanation was given; most of the people did not even know.
The group soon began to get worse. Some died. The population became concerned. Despite foreign aid and government propaganda, AIDS treatment in the country is a disaster. Fagaricine is currently no longer prescribed in Malabo hospital but it is still sold in a few pharmacies.
Meanwhile, Obiang and his circle receive their medical care abroad. Some pay astronomical bills in private clinics in the United States, while others are treated for free in Spain's public hospitals. At the same time private clinics flourish in Equatorial Guinea, but only the very well-off can afford their services. President Obiang's wife owns several of them; most have his family members as partners.
The government is unable to provide health care to the population. As opposition leader Plácido Mico noted at the National Economic Conference in November 2007 ‘the health care situation in Equatorial Guinea, a multimillionaire country, is without doubt the best example of our deep inequalities, injustices and social exclusion, as is the distribution of wealth in the country. Apart from Mongomo, no general hospital in the country permits even a straightforward x-ray.’ [2]
Equatorial Guinea is one of the main producers of oil and gas in Africa and has been a most favoured beneficiary of technical and economic aid from Spain for decades. The AECID implements its health work there ‘via various projects with one common denominator: the formation of a framework permitting the institution building of the National Health System’. One of these projects, the control of endemic diseases, is carried out for AECID by Spanish state bodies – the National Centre of Tropical Medicine and the Carlos the Third Health Institute. With formidable funding they aim ‘to achieve the training and improvement in operative capacity of local technical personnel in the Health System and in the National Programmes’[3]. The main endemic disease is AIDS.
The argument used by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation in Equatorial Guinea to justify their expenditure is that it is being used to build ‘local capacity’ for each of the ‘National Programmes’.
Tuberculosis and AIDS are allowed to get out of control while discriminatory laws are issued against people who are HIV positive, such as Presidential Decree No. 107/2006 of 20 November 2007, which ordains ‘the requirement of an HIV/AIDS test certificate in order to obtain certain public services’.
During the recent electoral campaign in Spain, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, the Spanish government's First Vice-President and Presidency Minister, promised, alongside Miguel Angel Moratinos, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, and Leire Pajín, Secretary of State for International Cooperation, that Spain would ‘make history in the next four years’ and be ‘a leader in solidarity’. She also stressed that Spanish socialists believe in politics ‘as a means to make the world a better place’ and that, since we are the eighth biggest economy in the world ‘we have to take on the responsibility demanded by our place on the world stage’.[3]
Despite the sonorous propaganda about international aid, more resounding still is the silence about the Obiang family's corruption and the consequences of Spanish development cooperation in Equatorial Guinea.
*Agustín Velloso is professor of education sciences at the National University of Education in Madrid. This article was translated by Toni Solo, an activist living in Nicaragua.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
*** For notes and references please click here
NOTES
1. http://www.who.int/countries/cog/publications/missive_27.pdf
2. http://www.cpds-gq.org/comunicados2007/noticia071113.html)
3. http://www.maec.es
4. http://leirepajin.blogspot.com/2008/02/de-la-vega-reafirma-en-acto-de-la.html
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Mbeki’s AIDS Denial: Grace or folly? Part IV
2008-04-22
William Gumede
Pambazuka News continues to serialise William Gumede's chapter on Mbeki and the controversies surrounding his AIDS policies. This is from his book 'Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC'. Be sure to look for the last part in the next issue.
For COSATU, the link between HIV and AIDS was irrefutable. General secretary Zwelinzima Vavi pointed to the success of Brazil, a country with similar income disparities to South Africa, in providing medication to its infected citizens, and called on the government to declare a national emergency in terms of TRIPS so that ARV delivery could start.
Formal criticism from inside the ANC was slow to emerge, with those who differed from Mbeki scared of reprisals if they spoke out. Most criticism was uttered in hushed tones, but Madisha’s and Vavi’s relentless public attacks on Mbeki’s AIDS stance opened the way for other prominent black figures to join the choir.
Some had kept their own counsel for fear of being lumped with white conservatives who had taken up the AIDS cudgel only because they could use it to bash the ‘inept’ black government. Thanks to Madisha, Vavi and prominent scientist William Makgoba, the Mbeki-ites could no longer charge that criticism was confined to white reactionaries bent on undermining the black government.
Once the wall of silence had been breached, the AIDS policy came under fire from within. Some of the harshest critics were members of the ANC’s health committee, one of the party’s constitutional structures, while former health minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma told Mbeki privately that his stance was undermining not only the government’s own policy, but his presidency.
The most serious opposition came from individuals serving on the ANC’s powerful NEC, but only as late as mid-2000. At an NEC meeting in Johannesburg, Dlamini-Zuma and Shepherd Mdladlana cautiously warned that Mbeki’s high-profile international advisory panel on AIDS was adding to confusion over the official AIDS message. They couched their arguments in a way that spared Mbeki from direct criticism, emphasising that the government’s message was not being effectively conveyed. They also warned that AIDS had the potential to undermine the ANC’s efforts in the 2000 local elections, given that opposition parties and civil movements were threatening to make AIDS, as well as slow social delivery to the poor, central campaign issues.
Mbeki loyalists such as Essop Pahad and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang responded dismissively that government was doing enough, within its capacity, to deal with the AIDS crisis. They listed AIDS education programmes and the amounts spent on them, arguing that it would cost too much to accede to calls by NGOs, trades unions and churches for the government to supply ARVs to all AIDS sufferers. Tshabalala-Msimang reiterated that the toxicity of ARVs had not been unequivocally determined, and cited warnings by the American government that some ARVs were believed to be so toxic that their use could prove fatal.
Mbeki was adamant that he would not backtrack on any of his AIDS statements, and continued to believe that his views were correct.
But he did agree, albeit reluctantly and unhappily, to refrain from further public comment on AIDS, at least until after the municipal elections. His chief policy guru, Joel Netshitenzhe, was assigned the unenviable task of extricating Mbeki from the hole he had dug for himself, without repudiating anything the president had previously said on the subject of HIV and AIDS.
Fully aware of the damage that had been done to the government’s reputation, Netshitenzhe fell back on the spin doctor’s hardy annual and attacked the media for colluding with critics of the official AIDS policy. Insisting that the government’s programmes were fully effective but not ‘on message’, he got the go-ahead for a R2-million advertising blitz that would somehow make it clear that neither the president nor anyone else in a position of authority had ever said that there was no link between HIV and AIDS.
‘We want to put the theorising behind us and programmes to fight the pandemic in front of us,’ said one senior NEC member optimistically. Mbeki’s international AIDS advisory panel would continue to meet, but behind the scenes, and the president would avoid all public reference to the pandemic until the local government ballots were cast.
The advertising campaign failed to clear up the confusion, not least because no one could admit what lay behind Mbeki’s withdrawal from the public AIDS debate. And since the dissidents continued to use his name in support of their own agenda, his silence was widely interpreted as confirmation that he did not agree with the messages imparted by official government policy.
In the wake of the NEC meeting, members of the ANC’s parliamentary wing became emboldened enough to make their voices heard on a range of issues, including the economic policy, Mbeki’s ineffective ‘quiet diplomacy ’with Zimbabwe and AIDS.
Nelson Mandela tried to meet with Mbeki to raise his concerns over the AIDS policy, but the president was smarting over what he saw as his predecessor’s constant criticism on the subject, and refused to take Mandela’s calls.
At a special meeting of the ANC’s parliamentary caucus in October 2000, Mbeki raged against senior leaders who criticised him in public, specifically on AIDS and Zimbabwe, and slammed the media for its coverage of the AIDS debate.
In contrast, he spoke approvingly about a conference in Uganda the previous month, where some 60 dissident scientists had argued convincingly that there was no scientific proof that HIV caused AIDS. He quoted from a document stating that the virus had never been isolated, and said reports that Uganda had scored significant successes in the fight against AIDS were untrue.
He told the gathered MPs that if one agreed that HIV causes AIDS, it followed that the treatment lay with drugs manufactured by Western corporations. The pharmaceutical companies therefore needed people to believe that HIV and AIDS were linked, in order to peddle their products. One drug company, which he did not name, had confessed, he said, that it had spent vast amounts of money on the search for an AIDS vaccine, but had abandoned the effort after failing to isolate the virus. This fact remained hidden from the public, Mbeki claimed, because the company’s share price would plummet if the truth were told.
He accused the CIA of being involved in a covert plot to spread the belief of an HIV/AIDS link, and cited statistics showing that 10 per cent of Africans died of AIDS. It made no sense, Mbeki argued, to focus the bulk of a state’s resources on this 10 per cent, to the detriment of the remaining 90 per cent. Drug companies continually urged governments to pay attention to a growing number of AIDS orphans, but how, asked the president, were the authorities to distinguish between the needs of AIDS orphans and orphans of any other kind?
He claimed he had the support of the editor of South Africa’s conservative daily newspaper, the Citizen, but said it was less clear that members of his own cabinet stood with him on this issue. They should declare their positions, he said, and the ANC’s MPs should join him in fighting off attempts by international forces to undermine him and the government’s agenda.
Those within the ANC who criticised him were playing into the hands of the local and foreign media – some of whom had dared to describe his views on AIDS as deranged – and unwittingly supporting the campaigns of the powerful drug companies and their allies, Western governments opposed to Mbeki’s vision of success for developing countries.
Before launching his tirade, Mbeki had made it clear to caucus chair Thabang Makwetla that he would take no questions. Deeply shocked by the virulence of his attack, none of the ANC MPs challenged anything he said. According to one, ‘there was a stunned silence in the room’.
Throughout his presidency, Mbeki’s Achilles heel has been his uncompromising ‘you are either with us, or against us’ attitude. He sees all criticism of government policy as a personal attack, and those who dare express views that contradict his own are categorised as secretly hating him, or, worse, wanting to topple him.
His censure of the AIDS critics choked any further criticism of the government’s policy. Not even the bravest ANC leaders would risk being labelled allies of a hostile ‘white’ media, greedy drug manufacturers or covert Western intelligence conspiracies.
In October 2001, during question time in parliament, it emerged that a number of ANC parliamentarians were taking ARVs, paid for by their state medical aid. The inescapable conclusion among activists was that the government could afford to pay for medicine for its own officials and representatives, but such help was too costly for the masses. Former opposition Pan Africanist Congress firebrand Patricia de Lille openly denounced the government’s ‘absolute hypocrisy’, but Mbeki’s response was merely to warn the ANC MPs that the drugs could be toxic. Having successfully drawn a curtain of silence over AIDS critics within the ANC, the president broadened his attacks to include black intellectuals, activists and individuals of all political persuasions who agitated against the government’s policies. A particularly vicious campaign was launched against outspoken physicist and political analyst Sipho Seepe, while Essop Pahad slammed local medical experts as ‘pseudo-scientists’.
Mbeki accused William Makgoba of deliberately leaking a long-awaited MRC report on the devastation wrought by AIDS in South Africa to the media before it was handed to him or the cabinet. Tshabalala-Msimang ordered a forensic audit to sniff out the source of the leak.
Achmat and TAC activists, many of them ANC cadres, were next to face Mbeki’s ire. He refused to meet any TAC representatives, telling confidants: ‘I will not give them the credibility of my presence.’ The vilification of Achmat as a pawn in the hands of Western interest groups intensified, and he was publicly accused of defying ANC discipline.
Achmat had infuriated Mbeki by travelling to Thailand in late 2000, buying 5000 fluconazole pills for 28 cents each, and bringing them back to South Africa in a well-publicised stunt. The government had him arrested for smuggling, and the attacks on the TAC only let up after Mandela visited a very sick Achmat at home in 2002 to plead with him to take ARVs.
Mandela lauded Achmat’s commitment to the ANC and praised him as a role model and loyal member, pledging to ensure that his protests were heard in the right government circles. ‘We were really under siege', Achmat later reflected, ‘and Nelson has given us protection. It was not for us that he did it. He’s not interested in opposing the government. He’s interested in doing what is right.’ Mandela had visited a clinic where the international humanitarian agency, Médicins Sans Frontières, was treating 400 patients with ARV and achieving a compliance rate that exceeded that of most AIDS clinics in America. After his emotional meeting with Achmat, the former president broke his own rule of non-interference with his successor’s governance and increasingly began criticising both Mbeki and the official AIDS policy in public. Mandela was greatly concerned about a growing perception that ‘the ANC does not care about the death of millions’.
He tried again to arrange a meeting with Mbeki, hoping to advise him that he and the First Lady, Zanele, should lead the anti-AIDS campaign. But every time Mandela called, Mbeki’s aides would say he was not available.
In November 2001, Mandela, frustrated at his inability to see Mbeki, used a speech at an ANC rally in the Cape Town settlement of Khayelitsha to extend the challenge to Mbeki and his wife to be the visible faces of government’s attempts to combat AIDS. ‘We have wasted time,’ he said, ‘but the more vigorous and focused we are in what we do, the greater the chance we have of moving forward.’ Mbeki was outraged. Yet again, he took the criticism personally, and privately accused Mandela of overstepping the line. He instructed aides to telephone Madiba and demand an explanation. Mandela denied that he had been attacking the president, and Mbeki finally agreed that they should meet, along with the ANC’s national working committee, to discuss the subject.
At the appointed time and place, however, Mbeki was conspicuously absent. Mandela joked that Mbeki was ‘too busy’, and told the committee that the government’s AIDS policy was creating the impression that it did not care if millions of South Africans died. He urged the immediate introduction of ARVs for pregnant women, as a start.
Jacob Zuma, standing in for the president, assured Mandela that the government was serious about the pandemic, but was not ready to roll out the ARV programme because the effectiveness of the drugs was still being tested in a pilot project. The only problem the government would admit to was one of communication, in keeping with Netshitenzhe’s earlier strategy.
Mandela agreed to reserve his doubts and questions for the next NEC meeting, which Mbeki would hopefully attend, but urged Zuma to play a leading role in the fight against AIDS, because Mbeki’s busy schedule frequently took him abroad.
Archbishop Tutu, just as exasperated as Mandela over the government’s vacillation on AIDS, went public with what was undeniably a rebuke of Mbeki:
'It would be tremendous if our president said this is the common enemy. The stance adopted by the president has harmed his image. He has done wonderfully well – the world thinks the world of him, I want to see him succeed. I think it is silly to hold on to positions that are untenable. At the present time, everybody recognises that the president’s position is undermining his stature in the world. When the New York Times is constantly bashing us over this issue, it is not good for us or for him. He has so much going for him.'
Tutu threw his full support behind efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus. ‘Yes, this means the use of Nevirapine if that is what is available. It is irresponsible of us not to save lives we could save. It makes us appear hard-hearted where we are not. We are seen to be lacking in compassion and [seem] uncaring. Women who are raped should be put on a course to ensure that they are not infected.’
He also made the point that, whereas AIDS was considered a chronic condition in the United States, it was tantamount to a death sentence in South Africa. At a January 2001 cabinet meeting, Mbeki finally acknowledged that negative perceptions of South Africa’s AIDS policies were based not on bad communication, but on a lack of consensus over what the government’s message should be. A year later, he and his cabinet accepted, for the first time, that confusion over the policy was no longer a medical or scientific matter, but a major issue that was undermining the country’s interests.
The opposition Inkatha Freedom Party leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, decried the lack of leadership on the AIDS front and proposed more stringent monitoring of the activities of Mbeki’s international AIDS advisory council. In his State of the Nation address at the opening of parliament, Mbeki hinted at finally putting the issue to rest when he spoke of government’s intention to ‘intensify its comprehensive programme against AIDS’.
Ahead of the NEC meeting in March 2002, Nelson Mandela was attacked by a number of Mbeki-ites, including one of the president’s loudest cheerleaders, Dumisani Makhaye, a KwaZulu-Natal ANC leader. Thami Mazwai, the black entrepreneur in charge of a publishing house, also launched a broadside against Mandela in the mass-circulation Sunday newspaper City Press, accusing him of unprecedented interference in government affairs.
The NEC spent a whole day discussing the government’s AIDS policy. All the provincial health MECs had been invited to the meeting, but members of the ANC’s health committee, who had been critical of the failure to make ARVs freely available, were barred. When Mandela voiced his concerns, he was heckled and jeered by Mbeki supporters.
The loyalists urged Mbeki to bulldoze ahead with the controversial AIDS policies rather than reverse or revise them, lest this be seen as caving in under pressure from Mandela and others. After hearing impassioned arguments from the likes of Peter Mokaba, the NEC resolved that rape victims, health workers and pregnant women should not be provided with ARVs, because the effectiveness of the drugs remained unproven. The hardliners also pushed through a bizarre decision that the government would appeal against the recent judgment by Judge Chris Botha in the Pretoria High Court ordering that Nevirapine be given to pregnant women.
This was one of several truly extraordinary reactions by the government to a high court ruling. Immediately after it was handed down, then justice minister Penuell Maduna, a trained lawyer, said the judgment could be enforced only in the province where the case was heard. He later retracted his statement, but Tshabalala-Msimang said on national television that the government would not obey the court order. For Mandela, the NEC’s decision to appeal against the ruling was the final proof that people were justified in seeing the ANC as a party that did not care about those who were dying of AIDS.
*William Gumede is the author of Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. His latest book, 'The Democracy Gap - Africa's Wasted Years', will be published later this year.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Pan-African Postcard
United States and Somalia
2008-04-24
Bill Fletcher
Bill Fletcher looks at the hypocrisy surrounding the United States' misadventures into Somalia.
Bush’s so-called war against terrorism entered a further, cynical stage with the recent classification of a Somali group as alleged ‘terrorists’. Al Shabab, the military wing of the Union of Islamic Courts, was declared by the US State Department to be a terrorist organisation. The Bush administration claims that ‘some’ members of Al Shabab are affiliated with Al Qaeda.
In order to understand the cynicism of this move it is important to remember that Somalia was a basket case for over a decade after the overthrow of the dictator Siad Barre. Filled with clan-based warlords, the country had no stable government. An international attempt to forge a transitional national government resulted in no further stability or end to the violence. The rise of a right-wing Islamist group known as the Union of Islamic Courts, however, brought about a period of relative stability and internal peace. While the group was and is ultra-conservative in many of its tenets, it was successful in crushing or co-opting many of the warlords. Further, it was an indigenous group to Somalia and not an arm of another country or an external social movement.
Using the pretext of an alleged - and unproven - connection between the Union of Islamic Courts and Al Qaeda, Ethiopian troops - encouraged and backed by the Bush administration - invaded Somalia in 2006 with the stated objective of supporting the Transitional Federal Government, an institution that was on its last legs and had little support within the population. Although the Ethiopians defeated the UIC in formal battle, the situation in Somalia devolved into guerrilla war and chaos. It has been going downhill ever since.
Al Shabab, whether one supports them or not, is an armed resistance movement. It has been carrying out military actions against troops of the country that invaded Somalia. One does not have to support the UIC or the actions of Al Shabab to recognise that a people have a right to oust those who invade their land.
The Bush administration’s action in classifying Al Shabab as ‘terrorists’ further complicates an already difficult situation. Instead of recognising that Al Shabab is the military wing of a legitimate movement, classifying them as alleged terrorists makes efforts towards a political resolution of the conflict unlikely, if not nearly impossible, just as has happened in Iraq. One does not have to like Al Shabab, or agree with its objectives, as long as it can be demonstrated on the ground that it is a movement that has a real constituency and is militarily confronting an occupying army.
The Bush administration, as it has done in other parts of the world, e.g. in Turkey with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), or in the Philippines with the Communist Party of the Philippines (and their New People’s Army), selectively chooses when to classify an insurgency or resistance as terrorists, based almost solely according to whether the target of the insurgency/resistance is a friend of the Bush administration. In the case of Somalia, the Ethiopians are doing the bidding of the Bush administration as well as serving their own regional ambitions.
There is another piece to this which is worth noting. Throwing around the label of ‘terrorist’ is also aimed at suppressing dissent here at home in the USA. Whether one is a Somali émigré, Somali American, or simply someone who supports Somalia’s right to national self-determination, the label of terrorist has a chilling effect on one’s willingness to speak out. As witnessed during the Cold War with the manner in which the charge of ‘communist sympathiser’ was used to suppress dissent, the suggestion that someone is either soft on terrorism or, worse, aiding and abetting an alleged terrorist group shuts down all reasonable discussion.
So, let’s be clear: the Bush administration is not interested in reasonable discussion. We, however, should be, so we need to push back against this latest outrage.
*Bill Fletcher Jr. is executive editor of The Black Commentator where this article first appeared [www.blackcommentator.com]. He is also a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum.
**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
Letters
Anti-Mugabe, anti-imperialism
2008-05-04
Steve Kibble
Thanks for the excellent piece [The Complexities of Zimbabwe, ]http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/47799] by Chido with which I am very much in agreement. Perhaps there is one small element not addressed though in the line up of the players. Whilst of course there is massive Western (and indeed African) leaders' hypocrisy in relation to Zimbabwe, there is also a strong element of Western (Northern?) civil society that is often conflated by outsiders into an undifferentiated 'West'. Although solidarity and anti-imperialism have been massively undermined, it is entirely consistent to be anti the Iraq war as well as the excesses of Mugabe etc - as indeed Pambazuka testifies. Indeed it seems only correct to be opposed to both neo-liberalism and authoritarian economic nationalism - which seem the different sides of the same coin
A luta continua.
Cheers to Pambazuka
2008-05-06
Alubsey
I love your news articles [The Complexities of Zimbabwe; ]http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/47799] They are very fairly written and balanced. Please continue the good work.
alubsey
Zimbabwe: do not fall prey, pray!
2008-05-05
Pambazuka reader
This article [Complexities of Zimbabwe, ]http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/47799] is right on the money. Yes, it highlights, 'the various competing interests in Zimbabwe, the MDC, Zanu-PF, Mugabe and the West in relation to what the Zimbabweans are hoping to get out of democracy'. The core of the matter is ‘what is in it for the people of Zimbabwe?' I pray for the people of Zimbabwe to be rescued from all those devouring animals. Let the world know that there are those despots and their cronies who seek not just power but use that power to subdue, intimidate, beat/ torture/ abuse and kill their own people – our brothers and sisters in many parts of Africa: Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan … People PRAY! Do not be prey.
Reading this brought back many painful memories. When will it ever stop?
Fahamu - Networks For Social Justice
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