Treatment battle undermined by corruption, says study

One of the country's foremost HIV/Aids activists has predicted that South Africa is headed for another Arms Deal-type scandal, this time over the new Aids drugs tender worth as much as R7 billion.

The new tender will be awarded next February, said senior Aids Law Project lawyer Fatima Hassan, but up to yesterday the tender committee members had not been made public, there was no civil society representation, nor was there any information about how the final decision would be made.

Hassan's concerns were echoed by other civil society activists and academics during yesterday's official launch of a ground-breaking study which examines corruption and accountability in HIV/Aids prevention and treatment efforts in South Africa.

In spite of billions of rands in donor aid to South Africa since 1997, the study said, the country had failed to produce positive results in an arena undermined by corruption and poor oversight.

Speaking at the launch in Cape Town, Hassan raised concerns over "tinkering with tenders" and warned that civil society had to be vigilant.

Other tenders in the field already the subject of dispute included those for testing kits and for pamphlets. "The drugs (ARV) tender is going to be the next Arms Deal - it's big, big money," she said.

The new tender is due in February and, if South Africa meets its treatment target of two million people on ARVs by 2011, it is expected to be worth at least double the current R3.1bn tender.

"That's public money and we don't know which company will get it," Hassan said.

Further controversy during the launch arose around the absence of Dr Nomonde Xundu, national director of the national Health Department's HIV/Aids and TB unit, who was billed as one of the keynote speakers.

Trusha Reddy, who edited the study, told the launch she had received a fax on Tuesday afternoon saying Xundu had been called by national Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to speak at an "urgent" meeting on PMTCT (Prevention of Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission).

Her absence was slammed by the other keynote speaker, Tshabalala-Msimang's former deputy, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, who said the launch would have given the government the "opportunity to see what they may not be seeing".

"It saddens me that (Xundu) pulled out at the last minute," Madlala-Routledge said, declaring that the "rear-view mirror of self-praise" had effectively kept the government from dealing with the crisis of HIV/Aids.

"This report tells us that we are being blind, that spending on Aids is not producing the results we should be achieving. And that is something we should own up to," she said.

In the report, corruption and poor oversight were highlighted as "a potentially lethal cocktail when combined with the rapacious Aids disease".

Effectively, it said, if massive funding increases did not translate into positive results the fault had to lie with other factors like lack of account-ability and corruption.

The report showed that donor funding to South Africa since 1997 totalled R2.3bn, but while funds were co-ordinated both nationally and provincially, budget-tracking mechanisms were lacking.

It also targeted President Thabo Mbeki's "denialism" as being at the centre of the government's "notoriously controversial" stance on prevention and treatment.

With acknowledgements to Di Caelers and Cape Argus.