Health minister Dr Manto Tshabalala Msimang sent a letter this week to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria requesting that its R720-million grant to KwaZulu-Natal be channelled through the SA National AIDS Council to be disbursed throughout the country.

Ministerial spokesperson Sibani Mngadi said the minister’s letter simply communicated the agreement reached two weeks ago between the national health department and KZN’s health MEC, Dr Zweli Mkhize.

According to this agreement, said Mngadi, the grant was to “fall under the SANAC and be distributed more equitably amongst all nine provinces”.

“We have no intention of rearranging the proposal, and nothing will be done with the money outside the guidelines of the Global Fund,” said Mngadi. “We have communicated our approach, and now it is up to the fund to respond accordingly.”

However, Fund spokesperson Melanie Zipperer has stated categorically that if South Africa intends to use the grant for areas outside of KZN, then this would mean that it would have to submit a new proposal.

Mngadi said he could not comment on this as he did not want to “pre-empt discussions between the government and the Global Fund”.

“Our understanding as national and provincial government is that the matter has been resolved. Now we have to check to see whether the arrangement is acceptable with the Global Fund, and we are prepared to adjust it accordingly in terms of the rules of the Fund.”

He said he was “not aware” that SANAC’s term of office had expired. SANAC is made up of representatives of civil society, business and government and is chaired by Deputy President Jacob Zuma.

A spokesperson in the presidency confirmed that SANAC members’ term had expired at the end of February and that there had not been new appointments as SANAC “needed to be restructured”.

The wrangle arose after a broad group within KZN – including the University of Natal, the provincial government and the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry – submitted a proposal directly to the Fund.

A few days before KZN sent off its proposal, the health minister had announced that SANAC was to be South Africa’s “country co-ordinating mechanism (CCM)” to oversee applications to the fund. Fund rules require every country’s applications to be submitted via a multi-sectoral CCM partnership to ensure the money does not simply become another government grant.

The KZN group submitted its proposal, but this apparently angered Tshabalala Msimang who demanded that the province withdraw it. The KZN group then wrote to the fund, to withdraw its application and explaining that it now needed to go via SANAC. However, the fund had already decided to award the grant to the province, one of the areas worst affected by HIV/AIDS in the entire world.

The national department of health was angered when KZN’s grant was approved, and government’s HIV/AIDS head Dr Nono Simelela said at the time she “did not understand” why it had been approved.

Government sources say that the fund did not respect process and needs to be made to recognise SANAC as appropriate body to control funs grants. However, to the international community, the wrangle has been interpreted as government’s reluctance to support HIV/AIDS programmes that incorporate dispensing anti-retroviral drugs through public health facilities. – Health-e News Service.