Mbeki's AIDS Mistakes

As President Bush begins his Africa tour today, it is difficult to overstate the devastation that AIDS has wrought at Africa, especially South Africa. That nation has one of the highest rates of infection in the world,20% of the population, and has the most infections on the continent, 5 million, according to the South African Mail & Guardian. Globally, AIDS has already killed more than a third of the 60 million people who have been infected.

Yet rather than seriously combat the dire problem his nation faces and accept offers of help from the West, President Mbeki of South Africa has entertained the pseudoscientific claim that H.I.V. does not cause AIDS. In May of 2000, Mr. Mbeki assembled a national AIDS panel, half of whose members shared this bizarre ideology, according to the New York Times. Since then, he has continued to question the correlation between H.I.V. and AIDS. Despite the advice of the established medical community, Mr. Mbeki has also resisted attempts by South African AIDS activists to obtain cheap, generic antiretroviral drugs.

Only recently did the Mbeki administration agree to distribute a limited quantity of retroviral drugs to persons living with AIDS, but not before the South African Constitutional Court forced it to do so. One senior official of the African National Congress, Mr. Mbeki's political party, recently told the New Yorker, "Western scientists once said to us the earth was flat. Now we know it's round. I bet one day we look at AIDS the same way."Another ANC official deemed a program dispensing antiretroviral drugs to the poor as being "reminiscent of the biological warfare of the apartheid era," according to the South African Press Association. Such defensive retorts are common, as critics of the government's AIDS policies are roundly labeled as racists. In the eyes of not only his Western detractors but also many of his AIDS-suffering countrymen, Mr. Mbeki's Afro-centric approach has resulted in the anguish of millions.

In the face of this kind of demagoguery, it is no small thing that Mr. Bush has taken such an interest in helping Africa out of the AIDS crisis, an attempt that contrasts sharply with the dilatory efforts of the previous administration. Mr. Bush, in his January State of the Union Address, committed $15 billion to international AIDS programs over the next five years, a substantial increase in spending. Mr. Bush modeled his initiative on a Ugandan plan that consists of abstinence, monogamy, and proper condom usage, and that provides the critical medical infrastructure required to implement it.

The president's strategy, which has won substantial bipartisan support, is one that will aggressively fight the AIDS epidemic as it includes funds for testing, counseling, and drug treatment. In an April speech urging Congress to pass his AIDS initiative, Mr. Bush said, "We can turn our eyes away in resignation and despair, or we can take decisive, historic action to turn the tide against this disease and give the hope of life to millions who need our help now." Now that Mr. Bush has travelled to Africa it is going to be illuminating to see whether the South African president is prepared to set aside his resentments toward America to take a more serious position on this scourge.