Nelson Mandela and His Part in the South Africa AIDS Disaster

I see a major revision of History underway concerning the Presidency of the late Nelson Mandela. While his personal story is dramatic, his years in office were marked by an inept slowness in responding to the HIV-AIDS crisis. In fact, South Africa is believed to have more people with HIV/AIDS than any other country in the world. The 2007 UNAIDS report estimated that 5,700,000 South Africans had HIV/AIDS, or just under 12% of South Africa's population of 48 million. In the adult population, excluding children, the rate is 18.10%. The number of infected is larger than in any other single country in the world. On this, the Mandela record is littered with failures: one of his biggest debacles was the multi-million dollar AIDS awareness campaign entitled “Sarafina 2.” The stage play was meant to educate the South African populous, but “AIDS experts called some of its dialogue dangerously inaccurate, its message unclear. And people wondered: Why had it cost so much? How had the cash-strapped national health department, the sponsor of the second version, paid for it?” Far from condemning the fiasco, officials of the African National Congress fiercely defended the Health Commissioner, Dr. Nkosazana Zuma. President Nelson Mandela even lashed out at the news media for '“creating such an uproar” and said Dr. Zuma should be left alone to do her job. After that mess, Zuma oversaw the promotion of a so-called AIDS cure—the drug Virodene. Virodene consisted largely of an industrial solvent and was said by medical experts to be more likely to be the agent that killed patients with AIDS than the disease itself. In addition, the wife of Mandela during his terms as President, Winnie, approved of and publicized a clinic calling itself the Genesis Research Centre that offered experimental “ox therapy” to people with AIDS. This involved injecting ozone into blood vessels. Dr Liz Floyd, Gauteng director for AIDS and communicable diseases, said: “When we visited the Genesis Centre with the Medicines Control Council people were undergoing treatment without a single medical doctor on the premises. Furthermore, there was no equipment to deal with any emergency which might arise from an adverse reaction to ozone—which is an extremely toxic substance.” It was also under Mandela that the government imposed the policy of not giving anti-retrovirals to pregnant mothers infected with HIV. Most shockingly, Zuma was never removed from office.