Deputies bring new energy to HIV/AIDS
Deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge has emerged from the shadows as a crucial lynchpin in government’s new approach to HIV/AIDS, which has seen it embracing AIDS organisations that it usually snubs.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), long a bitter critic of government’s inadequate response to HIV/AIDS, said this week that the deputy minister had been ‘instrumental in mediating between government and civil society’.
In the past week, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has reached out to the TAC and other AIDS organisations, urging a united front against the disease.
While Health Minister Dr Tshabalala-Msimang has been in hospital over the past three weeks, a powerful alliance has developed between Madlala-Routledge and Mlambo-Ngcuka, who is also the chairperson of the SA National AIDS Council (SANAC).
The two women are leading a bold bid to halve the rate of new HIV infections and ensure that appropriate treatment, care and support is available to 80% of people with HIV and their families by 2011.
Mlambo-Ngcuka has effectively made HIV the key focus of her office. The Deputy President has been quietly consulting a wide range of AIDS stakeholders over the past three months to develop a new HIV/AIDS strategic plan for the country for 2007-2011.
A draft of the 2007-2011 plan, to be released on World AIDS Day on 1 December, identifies its two primary aims as being to reduce new infections, especially among people aged 20 to 39, and to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on individuals, families and communities.
The draft describes the lack of monitoring, evaluation and clear targets as ‘major weaknesses’ of the previous plan, and sets a new series of ambitious targets.
These include:
· Treating 650 000 people with ARVs
· Distributing 500 million male condoms a year by 2011
· Promoting ‘mutual faithfulness’ among sexually active people
· Encouraging children under 15 to abstain from sex.
Madlala-Routledge, a Quaker and renowned peacemaker, has been instrumental in persuading previously antagonistic civil society organisations to support Mlambo-Ngcuka’s efforts, according to TAC General Secretary Sipho Mthati.
Revealing that the TAC had held regular meetings with the deputy minister over the past two years, Mthati said ‘we know she has really been campaigning internally in the ANC and government to get people to understand where we are coming from’.
Madlala-Routledge said in an exclusive interview with Health-e that, while she had not officially been given a new role, ‘certainly I have seen spaces being created for me which I really appreciate’. ‘I think I have been given the space to support the improvement of relationships,’ she added. ‘The Deputy President has indicated that she is aware of my abilities and strengths and she has drawn on these.’
For almost three years, Madlala-Routledge has been sidelined by Tshabalala-Msimang, according to health department sources. She has been consistently excluded from HIV/AIDS matters and, on the rare occasions that she has been allowed to give speeches, these have not even been posted on the health department’s website.
Yet over the past week, Madlala-Routledge has stunned even her inner circle by speaking out bluntly about government’s shortcomings.
Madlala-Routledge described South Africa’s stall at the international AIDS conference in Toronto at which the health minister promoted beetroot, garlic and lemons as AIDS treatments as ‘an embarrassment’. ‘Toronto was a catalyst and a turning point,’ she told Health-e.
‘It galvanised government to be on a new footing, and to recognise that the atmosphere of perpetual conflict with civil society is not helping the fight against HIV.’
The bitter struggle over AIDS has weakened the morale of health officials and undermined efforts to curb HIV, which is estimated to be killing 800 South Africans every day.
But, said Madlala-Routledge, the Deputy President’s efforts to revitalise SANAC and work with AIDS organisations had motivated officials.
‘I have been most encouraged by the spirit that I feel in the managers of the HIV programme. They are very enthusiastic and I think they have understood the present mood of saying we must increase access to HIV treatment at clinic level.’
Madlala-Routledge added that urgent resources also had to be allocated to stopping ‘criminals’ who were ‘flooding the South African market with untested HIV remedies’.
She also condemned as ‘irresponsible in the extreme’ senior government ‘including MECs and ministers’, who promoted these untested remedies.
Meanwhile, Tshabalala-Msimang has retreated to her home in Tshwane and few people have been allowed to visit her. Her reaction to government’s new direction on HIV/AIDS, which she will be obliged to drive, is unknown.
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