Writing to then leader of the opposition, Tony Leon, Mbeki said the following in 2000:

In your letter to me of June 19, you make the extraordinary statement that AZT boosts the immune system. Not even the manufacturer of this drug makes this profoundly unscientific claim. The reality is the precise opposite of what you say, this being that AZT is immuno-suppressive. Contrary to the claims you make in promotion of AZT, all responsible medical authorities repeatedly issue serious warnings about the toxicity of antiretroviral drugs, which include AZT.

On 28 October 1999, Mbeki told the members of the National Council of Provinces:

Two matters in this regard [the demand to make AZT available in the public health service] have been brought to our attention. One of these is that there are legal cases pending in this country, the United Kingdom and the United States against AZT on the basis that this drug is harmful to health. [This claim was untrue.] There also exists a large volume of scientific literature alleging that, among other things, the toxicity of this drug is such that it is in fact a danger to health. These are matters of great concern to the Government as it would be irresponsible for us not to heed the dire warnings which medical researchers have been making. I have therefore asked the Minister of Health, as a matter of urgency, to go into all these matters so that, to the extent that is possible, we ourselves, including our country’s medical authorities, are certain of where the truth lies.

And of course the later Minister of Health also had rather dangerous and bizarre views on the matter. Dr Tshabalala-Msimang, launching an anti-TB campaign on 15 March 2003 said the following:

In my heart I believe it is not right to hand them [AZT and other ARV drugs] out to my people.

The late Peter Mokaba, who died tragically under the influence of this denialism told The Star the following on 4 April 2002:

We have seen colonization, we have seen imperialism, we have seen apartheid … and all of them used against us as a people. [Africans have] won their liberation and now they are fighting another war and they are being psychologically terrorised once more because people want to sell [ARV drugs] and make profits. And there is no benefit in those products. The only thing that can really happen is that once you touch the antiretrovirals you can go one way.

This is the story behind the advert.

° What Would Mbeki say.

Mgwenya’s statement is shockingly anti-democratic and ill-informed. The fact is that President Zuma is not a private citizen like everyone else. He is the leader of the largest party in South Africa and President of the country. As the Constitutional Court has made clear, the right to privacy – like all other rights – are not absolute and not everyone can claim an absolute right to keep their private lives secret, regardless of who they are.

The more public a figure, the less privacy he or she enjoys. If private actions could have public consequences, a public figure enjoys very little privacy regarding those particular actions as this would impoverish our democracy as it would deprive us of information needed to form opinions about our political leaders.

The President is not an ordinary citizen. We pay his salary and we have a constitutional right to know whether his behavior is such that we would want to vote for the party he leads. To argue that this is a private matter is to argue that citizens do not have the right to know what their leaders get up to and what kind of characters they have. It is also to argue that our right to vote for the party of our choice in an informed manner should be trumped by the right to privacy of a man who has chosen to take up the position of president of the country – thereby forfeiting some of his privacy rights.

The view expressed by the ANC is reactionary and disrespectful of voters and if adhered to will potentially hold severe negative consequences for the quality of our democracy. Because Zuma is a public figure and a main player in our politics, he has forfeited some of his privacy. If the ANC does not believe this, they clearly have contempt for the dignity of voters and for the right of voters to make informed choices. The view espoused by Mgwenya thus poses a danger to our democracy and must be rejected with contempt.

The same can of course not be said for the baby President Zuma fathered. That baby did not choose to be fathered by the President and has a right to privacy. It would also be in the best interest of the child to keep his or her identity secret. The Sunday Times was therefore wrong to publish the full names of the baby.

The second – and distinct – question is whether the news that Zuma has fathered another child out of wedlock should be relevant for us when we make choices about whom to vote for. I am not a particularly moralistic person, so personally I would ordinarily say that the sexual adventures of a politician should have little or no bearing on his or her political standing. Normally the fact that a politician had an affair or fathered a child out of wedlock would say very little about his or her ability to govern the country and should not really be of great interest to us voters.

But this changes where the private actions of the politician directly contradict his or her public utterances and the policy positions of the party he or she belongs to or – in the case of President Zuma – leads. When that happens, a politician shows that he or she is a hypocrite and that we cannot trust a word he or she says and, hence, that he or she lacks the necessary character to be a political leader who should enjoy our trust. For example, if the leader of a Reborn Christian party who rails against homosexuality has a gay affair, we should condemn that politician – not because of the gay affair but because of the sheer hypocrisy of the man. Why would we ever believe anything that politician says ever again?

This is why the news of President Zuma’s love child is a big deal.

Our President has made many statements which directly contradicts his private behavior. Talking to religious leaders before the election he said that: “we need to teach our people to fear God… There are many other examples, which illustrate that the historical association of the ANC and the Church cannot be doubted. The ANC practically derived its moral vision from the church amongst other sources”.

As far as I know, very few people believe in a God that condones promiscuity and extra marital affairs, and the moral vision of the church is surely not one that condones extra-marital affairs and fathering children out of wedlock. This creates the impression that our President is a hypocrite who says one thing to church leaders (and pretends that the ANC  he leads has a vision in line with church teachings) when he personally does not adhere to that vision. This is usually called lying. I wonder what Ray McCauley (who is just about the divorce his second wife!) thinks about this behavior?

Last year President Zuma also made a brilliant speech on World Aids Day and many of us praised him and commended the ANC for this fresh approach to the disease. The ANC Youth League even launched a “one girlfriend, one boyfriend” campaign as part of this fresh approach to HIV prevention. Zuma himself said:

Our message is simple. We have to stop the spread of HIV. We must reduce the rate of new infections. Prevention is our most powerful weapon against the epidemic… All South Africans should take steps to ensure that they do not become infected, that they do not infect others and that they know their status. Each individual must take responsibility for protection against HIV. To the youth, the future belongs to you.

It does not mean that we should be irresponsible in our sexual practices. It does not mean that people do not have to practice safer sex. It does not mean that people should not use condoms consistently and correctly during every sexual encounter. We can eliminate the scourge of HIV if all South Africans take responsibility for their actions.

After the recent revelations it is far from clear whether President Zuma actually meant what he said. Perhaps President Zuma and the mother of his child both had an HIV test before they started having unprotected sex, but if that is the case we have a right to know. In the absence of such knowledge we will surely be forgiven for believing that the President is an unprincipled hypocrite who says one thing in public and commits the ANC to one policy and then does exactly the opposite in private.

At the very least President Zuma must tell us whether he was irresponsible in his sexual practices and whether he has taken steps to protect himself and his sexual partners from HIV infection. He should tell us whether he has had any other extra-marital sexual relations and whether he has fathered any other children out of wedlock. If he does not, the voters will be well within their rights to judge the President harshly and to conclude that he is a man who cannot be trusted, a man who would say anything to get elected – even if what he says is exactly the opposite of what he does.

This goes to the heart of the character of our President. Either he can be trusted and we can believe what he says, or he cannot be trusted and we should assume that he is a pathological liar. When his private actions suggest that he cannot be trusted, voters have a right to know about those actions. Moreover, they also have a right not to vote for him at the next election – not because he is less “moral” than Mother Theresa, but rather because he is not honest.

We may observe a moment of silence for the hundreds of thousands of people who have already died of AIDS related illnesses in South Africa. Many of them died needlessly because of the greed of pharmaceutical companies, the criminal neglect of some of our public health system officials and the madness that was then President Thabo Mbeki’s flirtation with AIDS denialism. With some notable exceptions, one must also decry the lack of leadership from many politicians across political party lines who through their actions, utterances or silence have contributed to the stigma and shame that still attach to HIV and prevent many South Africans from getting tested and treated for this manageable disease.

Ten years ago then President Thabo Mbeki first suggested that AIDS drugs could pose “a danger to health” in a speech to Parliament, setting the stage for the denialism and obfuscation to follow. This year, for the first time in ten years, World Aids day is not the depressing event filled with anger and frustration at all the wasted lives that we have become accustomed to over the previous ten years. Last month President Jacob Zuma made a ringing speech in which he rejected the absurdities of the Mbeki era and stated:

South Africans must know that they are at risk and must take informed decisions to reduce their vulnerability to infection or, if infected, to slow the advance of the disease. Most importantly, all South Africans need to know their H.I.V. status, and be informed of the treatment options available to them.

What we tend to forget is that we would not be where we are today if it was not for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and for the Constitutional Court. The TAC took on Mbeki and his government at the height of Mbeki’s power. It played a brilliant and strategically astute role in challenging the government’s confusing, intellectually arrogant and destructive, and often heartless policies and actions on HIV.

Making use of a combination of political mobilisation and legal action, the TAC won a famous victory in the Constitutional Court. This forced the then Minister of Health to swallow her words – uttered live on the TV news – that she would refuse to obey a Constitutional Court order to provide ARV’s to HIV pregnant mothers to save their new born babies from HIV infection.

The Constitutional Court, arguably going further than it had in the Grootboom case, found that the government had acted unreasonably by restricting the provision of ARV’s to HIV pregnant mothers to a few pilot sites. The Court rejected all the arguments presented on behalf of the Minister (the same arguments which President Mbeki also peddled) regarding the efficacy and dangers of ARV’s and found that the government action was so unreasonable that it was acting unconstitutionally by preventing poor women from accessing life saving ARV’s  for their babies.

Shortly after this judgment was handed down I attended a workshop with members of the Department of Health to discuss the possibility of providing wider access to ARV’s to South Africans living with HIV. Two things struck me at that meeting: all the officials were terrified of Tshabalala-Msimang and all the officials were terrified that their HIV policies will be successfully challenged in the Constitutional Court.

Shortly afterwards the government announced that it would progressively roll our ARV’s to all who needed it. Without the TAC and without the potent judgment of the Constitutional Court, this would not have happened and many more people may have died needlessly. Some lawyers dismiss the social and economic rights (including the right of access to health care) enshrined in the Bill of Rights on the basis that the do not mean much and has little effect. But they forget that these rights have an effect not only in courts but also more broadly.

The TAC understood from the start that the right of access to health care in the Bill of Rights provided them with a tool through which it could mobilise civil society and the ANC alliance partners against Mbeki and his allies. They understood that social and economic rights battles should be waged strategically, both inside courtrooms and on the streets.

Much still has to be done to fix the HIV/AIDS mess. Many poor people and people in our prisons still die because they have no access to ARV’s. Some government officials still peddle the utterly counter productive ABC message of prevention instead of focusing on condom use and the difficulties experienced in our patriarchal culture by many vulnerable women in trying to protect themselves from infection. But at least something is being done.

Meanwhile, I can only hope that former President Thabo Mbeki (for once) takes advice from Zwelenzima Vavi and apologises for the way in which his government dealt with HIV. Who knows, an apology might even enhance his reputation, which must surely be at rock bottom in South Africa at the moment.

Ours should be about ensuring that condoms become fashionable. Every time you greet each other you must ask, how are you? Do you have a condom with you? It should not be an apologetic issue.

Maybe if someone as outspoken and popular as Julius Malema puts his full weight (so to speak) behind a campaign to make condoms fashionable and urges young people to insist on condom use we have a chance to turn this thing around. Maybe if Malema and others drop the ridiculous and counter-productive notion that we will stop the spread of HIV if we promote the ABC (”abstain”, or “be faithful” and if you cannot do the above ”use a condom” – in other words, insist on a condom if you want everyone to think you are promiscuous), we have a chance.

Of course, our leaders should have said this kind of things many years ago, before hundreds of thousands of people had died needlessly of HIV related illnesses. But I suppose its better late than never, so I will be the first to applaud Mr Malema and to encourage him to continue the good work.

But then, another publication reported that at the same event, commenting on the call by Young Communist League leader Buti Manamela that Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and Thabo Mbeki should be charged with genocide for not providing dying South Africans with anti-retroviral drugs, Mr Malema said the following:  

We must never surrender our leaders.  Thabo Mbeki might have made mistakes but we can never charge him. We must not charge one of our own. If we allow that, the same thing would happen to [Zimbabwean President Robert] Mugabe, and the same would happen to [President Jacob] Zuma, and the next thing you know they will come for you.

Now, I do not want to get involved in a debate here on whether Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang should be charged with genocide and whether such a charge against them would stick. I do wish to take issue with young Julius’s view on the Rule of Law though. Saying that one should never charge one of your own is dangerous and undermines the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

Our leaders, no matter how well respected and loved, are not above the law. If they break the law they have to be charged. Just like every other South African – whether she lives in Houghton or Lusikisiki, Bischops Court or Pofadder, Witsieshoek or Nkandla – a leader in a constitutional democracy is not above the law.

Suggesting that leaders – because they are our leaders – should never be charged with any crime, no matter how heinous that leader’s actions have been, how detrimental to the poor and downtrodden, how murderous or anti-democratic, demonstrates a profoundly undemocratic and anti- constitutional view of politics.

This is the kind of view that allows young politicians like Julius Malema to jump out of his car in a dazed state and express his existential confusion by urgently asking those who stopped him to please tell him who he was. It is the kind of view which holds that leaders are beyond criticism and that even if they do the most shocking things, they should be above the law. Down that road lies tyranny, despotism and the most egregious abuses of the rights of ordinary citizens by powerful leaders: it is the way of Pol Pot, Adolt Hitler and Idi Amin.

In a constitutional state, leaders should actually be beyond reproach. If we are going to charge anyone it should be our leaders who have broken the law.  In a constitutional democracy we entrust them with our money, our well-being and our futures and if they abuse that trust by stealing our money, killing political opponents or ordering the police to torture the leaders of social movements who are critical of them, such leaders seize being worthy of our respect and, in effect, seize being our leaders at all.

What worries me is that Julius sees himself as a leader as well and hence believes that he is also above the law. No wonder he has failed to pay so many speeding fines and called his friends in government to reprimand traffic cops who had the audacity to stop him for speeding. Today it is traffic fines, tomorrow it is hit squads and torture.

Ag nee man Julius, just when I thought the media had been treating you harshly you say something like this which reminds me that you have a lot to learn about constitutional democracy and the Rule of Law. Stick to the condoms and  HIV: at least you are doing good work on that front.

President Thabo Mbeki is a master at this. He really is not someone with a great fondness for honesty and truth.

Earlier this week Mbeki denied ever having said that HIV does not cause AIDS. A “(im)plausible denial” of the generally accepted interpretation of his words, if ever there was one. At the time Mbeki had said:

“Does HIV cause AIDS? Can a virus cause a syndrome? How? It can’t, because a syndrome is a group of diseases resulting from acquired immune deficiency.”

And in an interview with Time Magazine on September 4 2000, Mbeki stated that, “the notion that immune deficiency [AIDS] is only acquired from a single virus [HIV] cannot be sustained.” When asked whether he was prepared to “acknowledge that there is a link between HIV and AIDS?” he replied:

This is precisely where the problem starts. No, I am saying that you cannot attribute immune deficiency solely and exclusively to a virus.

So, in a dry technical sense Mbeki is not peddling a “deliberate falsehood” when he says he never said the words: “HIV does not cause Aids”. Plausible deniability. Problem is, he questioned the link between HIV and AIDS and said a virus cannot cause a syndrome and this was widely understood by those spineless cabinet Ministers (who refused at the time to state that HIV causes AIDS), state officials and ordinary people to mean that Mbeki did not believe that HIV caused AIDS. And Mbeki, who at any time during the controversy could have corrected this impression, failed to do so.

This is like asking whether apartheid was really bad for South Africa and had really caused the suffering of millions of South Africans, then when asked directly whether I thought apartheid was bad for South Africa and had caused misery to say: “no, there are many reasons for people’s misery”.  Then years later denying that I had ever suggested that apartheid caused suffering.

Now, hundreds of thousands of deaths later, Mbeki wants to rewrite history. Why take responsibility for your words when they come back to bite you? That would require courage and honesty – two things our former President seems to lack.

Another example of this lack of basic honesty was revealed in his affidavit in support of his suspension of Vusi Pikoli. In the affidavit Mbeki stated:

I had to confer with the NSC to establish the risk posed by this decision [not to provide more time to arrest Selebi] and considered ways of minimising any potential threat to national security…. All I can say is that following such discussion [with the NSC] the advice I received was to suspend the applicant from office with immediate effect.

At the time it was widely reported that Mbeki had said that he had suspended Pikoli on the advice of the NSC. Mbeki never corrected this. Now the Presidency has issued a statement saying:

Former President Thabo Mbeki did not say he was advised by the National Security Council to suspend the NDPP. All he said was that he conferred with the National Security Council.

So, at best Mbeki was misleading the court and the public by his innitial statement and then – more importantly, by his silence afterward. At worst he was committing perjury.

Would you buy a second hand car from this man? I won’t.

The ANC government has in effect told the poorest of the poor HIV positive people of the Free State who need to get access to ARVs: “Oops, we have run out of money so you are going to die”.

Surely other political parties should make a big stink about such a thing? After all, its rather damaging to the image of the governing party that it has decided to let some mostly poor black South Africans die because of poor planning or turf wars between various ANC factions in government or perhaps because of Aids denialism? What can be more important for a government than to protect its citizens from illness that will cause death?

As Mark Heywood reports: “Somewhere around November 1 last year, the death penalty was reintroduced in the Free State.” This is because those who depend on the states ARV programme are the poorest members of our society who do not have medical aid and cannot afford the R600 a month to buy the life saving medicine. Many of them need to go on ARVs immediately to save their lives. But now the Free State government has decided that there is no money and that these people must wait until 1 April 2009 – by which time many of them will be dead.

Several questions arise. First, why is the Free State government so criminally callous? Is it because those people who are HIV positive are poor and black? Or is it because they are HIV positive and therefore in the eyes of the Aids denialists in the ANC government in the Free State do not deserve the same concern and respect as, oh, say a convicted crook and fraudster like Schabir Shaik?

Or maybe the Free State government officials just do not care because these people are going to be dead and won’t be voting for the ANC in any case? Or are these people going to die “merely” because of corruption and nepotism in the ANC government in the Free State? Or are they going to die because the ANC government officials and politicians do not care because they know they will win the election in any case – no matter whether they allow HIV positive people to live or die?

Second, what is the national Minister and the national government doing to try and change this situation? Are they at least trying to save the lifes of the people who rely on the government for life saving treatment? Have the relevant ANC officials and politicians who are killing people in the Free State been fired? Have they been disciplined by the ANC? If not, why is nothing being done?

Is it because the ANC does not respect poor people? Or is the ANC racist and more worried about freeing a convicted fraudster like Shaik from prison because he happens to be a friend of Jacob Zuma than saving the lives of mostly poor and black South Africans? Would these unfortunate HIV positive people in the Free State now dying have been saved if they were friends with Jacob Zuma or knew someone else who style themselves as an important politician in the ANC?

And why is the opposition parties not all over this? Are they scared to speak up for HIV positive people because of the deeply entrenched prejudices amongst all classes and races of South Africans about HIV? Are they keeping quiet because they do not want to be seen to champion the rights and needs of a vulnerable and marginalised group in our society? Or do they also not mind that these people are going to die because they would not have voted for the opposition in any case?

Pardon me if I sound bitter, but this callous and deeply criminal actions of the Free State government shocks me. Section 27 of our Constitution states that everyone has a right of access to health care and that the state has a duty progressively to realise this right. The Constitutional Court has said this means the state cannot be rigid in implementing health policies and that they have a duty to act reasonably to ensure that the policy is also implemented in an effective manner to deal with the needs of especially the most vulnerable members of society.

This clearly has not happened in the Free State.

Why would one trust a government who cannot even do the basics right, who cannot even manage their resources in such a way to ensure that they will save the lives of as many people as possible? No wonder many people are cynical about politicians. Why would one trust people who seem to care more about their right to speed about in 20 car blue light motorcades and who would rather sip champagne and eat caviar than actually do the work that would save the lives of ordinary citizens?

I am by nature a rather sceptical person (maybe it is the legal training or maybe it is because I do not believe in the tooth fairy anymore, who knows?), so pardon me for not jumping so easily on the conspiracy bandwagon. It might well be that there is a political conspiracy against Mr. Jacob Zuma. Maybe the National Prosecuting Authority has been infiltrated by colonialist, racist CIA agents in cahoots with Thabo Mbeki, Tony Leon, and all those leaders of Cope who had the bloody cheek to start their own party. And, who knows, maybe judge Chris Nicholson concocted his own conspiracy theories when he sat down to write his judgment in the Zuma case - as was rather unkindly suggested by the Acting Deputy President of the SCA.

But as the SCA judgment on Monday made clear, no conclusive evidence have been presented for any of these conspiracy theories. This does not mean that there might not be some questions worth asking, of course. Questions like why Jacob Zuma was investigated and prosecuted for rather minor issues of corruption (the poor guy only received R500 000 from the arms company!) while Chippie Shaik, the ANC and various other players reported to have benefited far more from the arms deal have so far not been charged.

It is worth asking such questions, but maybe we should be a little bit careful before making wild allegations of conspiracies because we might just come accross as mentally unstable and a bit coocoo. If we are not careful we might even be confused with Julius Malema or those wonderful people from the Young Communist League who entertain us with their almost daily badly written, and sometimes downright weird, press releases.

I therefore have some sympathy for Mr. Thabo Mbeki who was fired shortly after Nicholson in effect found that Mbeki and his Ministers had meddled in the prosecution of Zuma – thus seeming to confirm one of the most widely held conspiracy theories around. In the absence of hard evidence, it was rather surprising that a judge in motion proceedings would come to such a conclusion, despite the lingering questions about the whole Zuma affair.

Who knows what Mbeki had whispered into the ears of advisors about the Zuma prosecution and what they, in turn, might have whispered to the NPA?  Who knows why Mbeki had not intervened to stop the prosecution of Zuma? Why he had fired Zuma as Deputy President – even before he was charged - but went into an apoplectic fit when Vusi Pikoli wanted to arrest the Police Commissioner for corruption and then got his advisors to help quash the warrants for Jackie Selebi’s arrest. (This latter fact was proven beyond doubt during the Ginwala Commission of Enquiry, so those Mbeki fans out there, calm down.)

But I was nevertheless, shall we say, suprised and amused by some aspects of Thabo Mbeki’s response to the SCA judgment. First, Mbeki gives his own interpretation of the judgment that might – at best – be described as a rather innovative interpretation of its outcome and - at worst – as a twisting of the facts. Said Mbeki:

We intervened in the NPA appeal to the SCA because we wanted to correct the unfair and unwarranted inferences made by Judge Nicholson against us, and as the SCA said, we “had ample reason to be upset by the reasons in the judgement which cast aspersions on (us) without regard to (our) basic rights to be treated fairly.” The SCA ruling has vindicated us.

Problem is, only in the most broadest sense of the word has the SCA “vindicated” Mbeki and his cabinet. The judgment decidedly did not find that there was no political meddling in the Zuma prosecution. It merely said that there was not sufficient evidence before the court to have made such a finding – especially given the rules of evidence that apply in motion proceedings. The jury is still out about whether Mbeki and his cabinet did interfere or not, so to talk of a vindication is perhaps a little bit premature.

But this is perhaps a small point. One must not be too churlish. Given the fact that Mbeki was fired in the wake of the Nicholson judgment – even though he was not given an opportunity to give his side of the story – one can be generous and allow the ex-President to stretch the truth a little to score a political point against those upstarts who think they can run the country into the ground as well as he did.

So, let’s grant Mbeki the satisfaction of the claim that he was vindicated and move on to the last paragraph of his statement, which brings us right back into – you guessed it! – conspiracy theory country. In vintage Mbeki style and with all the dry, bitter, certainty of a person who once questioned the link between HIV and AIDS because of what he read on the Internet – to the detriment of 300 000 people who then died – Mbeki continues:

It seems to me that the unacceptable practice of propagation of deliberate falsehoods to attain various objectives is becoming entrenched in our country. I am pleased that the SCA has provided firm leadership in this regard by insisting that nobody’s integrity should be impugned on the basis of untested allegations.

Mbeki loves that phrase – “deliberate falsehoods”. It suggests that Mbeki thinks that there is only one possible’s interpretation of any set of facts, that what he claims to be true must be accepted by the rest of us as absolute and final proof of that Truth, and that any questioning of his version of events or his interpretation of the facts constitutes a conspiracy to ”deliberately” spread false information.

He seems to think: “I told you what the Truth is – yet you do not believe me. How can that be? How dare you? The impertinence! Surely you know that I am so wise, so imbued with integirty, wisdom and an ability to interpret facts definitively (a bit like God, really) that what I say will ALWAYS be true, just because I said it. If you then question the Truth of what I said, it must be because you deliberately want to spread falsehoods about me, my government, black people in general, the arms deal, the existence of crime, the nobility of the masses of our people, the ANC and its traditions and, for that matter, HIV and AIDS.”

This seems to me like a very, very scary world view for a leader of a country to hold. It eschews doubt for a kind of messianic certainty. It fails to understand that in a democracy politicians must earn our trust through their words, yes, but also through their deeds, that we – “the masses of our people” - have a duty to be sceptical about the self-exculpating claims made by politicians and that we are not part of some conspiracy, deliberately spreading falsehoods about the politician or his government, just because we do not believe every word the politician – even our President – says.

Besides, sometimes the known facts are open to different interpretations and even reasonable people may differ about how the known facts can or should be viewed. We all interpret facts from the vantage point of our own world view. Mbeki has often made the excellent point that many sceptics of his government interpreted the facts about South Africa’s progress away from apartheid injustice towards a more egalitarian and sane country, based on their rather Afro-pessimistic, colonialist, world view.

But that does not mean Mbeki himself does not have a world view and that his interpretation of an event or of a set of facts will be devoid of self-interest, delusional paranoia or prejudice. Just think about his flirtation with AIDS denialism. Duhhh!

The fact that he never could apply his excellent insights about the inevitable situatedness of our version of events to himself says a lot about the tragedy of Mbeki’s reign as President of the ANC and the country. When one forgets that one’s world view might not be shared by others and that one’s interpretation of the facts might be clouded by the fact that one travels in a eleven car motorcade and are obsequisly bowed down to by others, one becomes arrogant and out of touch. And that is one of the real, very human, tragedies of Thabo Mbeki’s Presidency.

As I pointed out last week, a new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.

Yesterday the New York Times published an article about this study, reminding us again how disastrous Mbeki and his Minister of Health have been to the health of our people. That is one of the reasons why I do not share Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s view that the recalling of Mbeki was a dreadful and constitutionally problematic step.

Our Constitution requires that the President retains the confidence of the majority of the members of the National Assembly and if he or she loses that confidence, the NA can institute a vote of no confidence in the President. That is how our quasi-Westminster system was designed to operate and there was nothing wrong with the ANC recalling Mbeki after it lost confidence in him. In fact, Mbeki should have been recalled long ago and it is an indictment of the ANC that it took so long for them to get rid of this man.

That is also why, so far, I am a rather big fan of President Kgalema Motlanthe, who acted on the first day of his presidency two months ago to remove the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a polarizing figure who had proposed garlic, lemon juice and beetroot as AIDS remedies. The subsequent appointment of Barbara Hogan was also an inspired choice. According to the New York Times Hogan said:

“I feel ashamed that we have to own up to what Harvard is saying,” Ms. Hogan, an A.N.C. stalwart who was imprisoned for a decade during the anti-apartheid struggle, said in a recent interview. “The era of denialism is over completely in South Africa.”

What a breath of fresh air! Just imagine how Ms Tshabalala-Msimang would have responded to this study and weep for South Africa and its long suffering people. A President who can fire an incompetent and criminally negligent Health Minister and appoint a person of the caliber of Hogan would get my vote. Pity he will not be the ANC’s election candidate next year.

But the New York Times article also contains other very interesting tidbits. It refers to an article written by Ngoako Ramathlodi in which he recounts the way in which Nelson Mandela was humiliated during a 2002 ANC meeting after he made a rare appearance to question the party’s stance on AIDS.

Mr. Ramatlhodi described speakers competing to show greater loyalty to Mr. Mbeki by verbally attacking Mr. Mandela as Mr. Mbeki looked on silently. “After his vicious mauling, Madiba looked twice his age, old and ashen,” Mr. Ramatlhodi wrote.

Mr. Ramatlhodi himself acknowledged in a recent interview that in 2001 he sent a 22-page letter, drafted by Mr. Mbeki’s office, to another of Mr. Mbeki’s most credible critics, Prof. Malegapuru Makgoba, an immunologist who was one of South Africa’s leading scientists. The letter accused Professor Makgoba of defending Western science and its racist ideas about Africans at the expense of Mr. Mbeki.

In 2000 Mr. Mbeki had provided Professor Makgoba with two bound volumes containing 1,500 pages of documents written by AIDS denialists. After reading them, Professor Makgoba said in an interview that he wrote back to warn Mr. Mbeki that if he adopted the denialists’ ideas, South Africa would “become the laughingstock, if not the pariah, of the world again.”

But Mr. Mbeki indicated last year to one of his biographers, Mark Gevisser, that his views on AIDS were essentially unchanged, pointing the writer to a document that, he said, was drafted by A.N.C. leaders and accurately reflected his position.

The document’s authors conceded that H.I.V. might be one cause of AIDS but contended that there were many others, like other diseases and malnutrition.

The document maintained that antiretrovirals were toxic. And it suggested that powerful vested interests — drug companies, governments, scientists — pushed the consensus view of AIDS in a quest for money and power, while peddling centuries-old white racist beliefs that depicted Africans as sexually rapacious.

“Yes, we are sex crazy!” the document’s authors bitterly exclaimed. “Yes, we are diseased! Yes, we spread the deadly H.I. virus through our uncontrolled heterosexual sex!”

The letter written by Mbeki’s office contains astonishing new proof of Mbeki’s denialism. In the usual Mbeki way, it refers to the very real and despicable racism prevalent in the West, and then uses this to question the science around HIV/AIDS. It is astonishingly lacking in logic and suggests to me that Mbeki may not be as clever as we thought he was. It argues that because public health policy in the West has often been informed by racism, the scientific research on HIV  and ARVs – done in laboratories in the West to save the lives of people in the West – must also therefore be suspect.

So for Mbeki, HIV tests, the science around the causes and progression of HIV and the miracle ARV medicines developed in Western laboratories now saving the lives of millions of people around the world, cannot be trusted because to trust this would be to accept a view of Africans as rapacious, sexual beings. Mbeki’s letter also questions whether South Africa has an HIV problem at all – despite the fact that between 12 and 20% of pregnant women tested at clinics are found to be HIV positive. Who cares about scientific tests and the lives of ordinary poor and black South Africans if wounds have to be licked, scores settled and arguments won? This letter should be exhibit A in the indictment of Mbeki’s Presidency.

But what also struck me of the article is the fact that all those ANC NEC members were “competing to show greater loyalty to Mr. Mbeki by verbally attacking Mr. Mandela”. Mr Zuma did not speak up then. Neither did Mr Ramatholdi. They sat there quietly while their leader was promoting quackery masquerading as a politically correct pro-African intervention. Why did so few speak up then? Were they scared of Mbeki? And if so, what does it say about their honour and their commitment to the betterment of the lives of the masses of our people? Why did they choose to rather keep the leader happy than to do something that would save the lives of hundreds of thousands of South Africans? How do they sleep at night?

Now Ramatlhodi – and many others who sat quietly while Mbeki’s quackery was allowed to kill thousands of South Africans – are of course Jacob Zuma supporters. Will they (are they already?) showing the same kind of disastrous loyalty to a new leader with feet of clay? Is that the inevitable result of a mindset that holds the Party and the Leader to be more important than principle, than the truth, than the lives of our people?

Is that why there is not a snowballs hope in hell that the ANC will ditch Zuma and nominate Motlante to be our President after the next election? Is the ANC doomed to repeat the mistakes it made in the past by blindly following Zuma over the cliff? We will see. If Hogan is retained as health minister after the election, if the NPA is allowed to try and prove its case against Zuma in court, if ANC leaders do not sit silently by while Zuma and his cohorts undermine the judiciary, I would be the first to admit that maybe the ANC has learnt something from the Mbeki disaster.

For the sake of South Africa and all its people, I sure as hell hope it has.

More than 330,000 lives were lost to HIV/AIDS in South Africa from 2000 and 2005 because a feasible and timely antiretroviral (ARV) treatment program was not implemented, assert researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in a study published online by the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes.

In addition, an estimated 35,000 babies were born with HIV during that same period in the country because a feasible mother-to-child transmission prophylaxis program using nevirapine (an anti-AIDS drug) was not implemented, the authors write.

Wonder what Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and Thabo Mbeki would say about this study….

The judges are entangled in the controversy surrounding Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe and the Constitutional Court as theyw ere both acting judges on the Constitutional Court when Judge President Hlophe allegedly approached judges of the Constitutional Court about the Zuma matter.

It is difficult to know why these judges withdrew but I would guess the JSC decided that it would be inaprpriate for them to consider the application by these two judges before the complaints against and by Judge President Hlophe have been dealt with.

Had the JSC considered the applications of these two judges and had they recommended any of these judges for appointment, Judge President Hlophe’s legal advisers could easily have argued that the JSC had pre-judged the case. It would then have been possible to say that the JSC had  created the impression that  it believed the allegations made by Jaftha against the Judge President. Justice would then not have been seen to be done. The Constitutional Court judges could have argued the same thing if the judges were not recommended for appointment.

Although unfortunate, it was therefore probably a wise move for the judges to withdraw their applications at this stage in order to ensure that the JSC deal with the Hlophe matter without exposing themselves to charges of bias.

The withdrawals leave just four candidates for the post — the exact number required by the constitution to be submitted to the president to choose from. These are Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) Judge Edwin Cameron, high court judges Shehnaz Meer and Nigel Willis, and Northern Cape Judge President Frans Kgomo.

Obviously the name of Justice Edwin Cameron stands out among these candidates. As I had argued before, a candidate should qualify for a position on the Constitutional Court if he or she has the requisite legal skills and knowledge as well as the commitment to social justice required by the Bill of Rights. Cameron clearly has both. Although he was recommended for appointment before, then President Thabo Mbeki did not appoint him, probably because of Cameron’s harsh (but courageous and true) criticism of Mbeki’s stance on HIV/AIDS.

In his interview yesterday Cameron acknowledged that he might have “overstepped the line” with his outspoken public criticism of Mbeki and then-Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s poor leadership on HIV/AIDS but said that his own 22-year battle with the syndrome had left him feeling ‘that I could not keep quiet’. According to a Cape Times report, he told the JSC:

“I thought I was going to die at the end of 1997 … I was desperately sick, but my life was given back to me (through anti-retroviral treatment) …and I felt that I had to speak up.’ Cameron was then asked by Marumo Moerane SC, if his own HIV-positive status would stop him from hearing HIV-related cases brought before the Constitutional Court. The judge responded that he would not hear cases related to HIV treatment. Justice Minister Enver Surty, who attended the commission’s sitting, told Cameron that he ‘empathised’ with his struggle.

One may argue that judge Shehnaz Meer – who also displayed a strong commitment to social justice in her interview yesterday – might also get the nod from the Presaident despite the fact that she does not have the same technical knowledge of the law that Cameron has, seeing that there are currently only three women on the Constitutional Court.

But I would argue that given his vast knowledge of the law, his technical brilliance, and the fact that 5 million South Africans are living with HIV, the selection of Cameron would be the wise and correct choice. It would also be a bold affirmation of the rights of people living with HIV and would send a strong signal countering the prejudice and hate still experienced by people living with HIV.

Although the JSC can indicate their preferences when they forward the names to President Motlanthe, the President has the final say in this matter. If he chooses Cameron it will signal a move away from the vindictive attitude of Thabo Mbeki and will say much about Motlanthe’s integirty and wisdom. If it is not Cameron, it will be a sign that Motlanthe might not always be in a position to do the right thing and might be taking instructions from Luthuli house.

I am waiting with bated breath for the outcome because not only will it tell us something about our new President, it will also decisively influence the quality of the members serving on the Constitutional Court.