Chris Hani's Warning

By the 1980s, the ANC knew that, short of a massive social and political effort, HIV/AIDS would constitute a crisis for the disenfranchised South Africans it fought to liberate from apartheid's racial exclusions. Heeding the warnings of epidemiologists and drawing on his own observations of how AIDS had begun to decimate the post-independence dreams of people in parts of Africa, the ANC and SA Community Party leader Chris Hani warned against ignoring the explosion of the then nascent epidemic in South Africa. ‘We cannot afford to allow the AIDS epidemic to ruin the realisation of our dreams’, he said in 1991, some years before being assassinated by rightwing fanatics.

His foresight and subsequent initiatives, including a Johannesburg conference of over 100 organisations held in 1992, concluded that an HIV/AIDS campaign ‘… must be rooted in community action and involve the political leadership and, while stressing the need for individual behavioural change, it had to be set within a social context’ and laid a solid foundation for the new government to respond.

But Hani's warning had to be heeded with unwavering vigour by the ANCled government of 1994. With a completely captive citizenry, the ANC and other constituents of the democratic movement had ample opportunity to lead the country away from Hani's catastrophic warning. While Mandela and the ANC of his time did not negate the importance of AIDS, their preoccupation with reconstruction and development meant they did not pay enough specific attention to AIDS. But it was Mandela's successor who took things to a new low.

Within the first year of his presidency, Thabo Mbeki turned AIDS into a matter for public contestation and political wrangling instead of a national crisis that deserved decisive political leadership. Under his leadership, a political culture of intolerance became entrenched. At the height of the AIDS controversy, Smuts Ngonyama, ANC spokesperson turned millionaire, referred to people living with HIV/AIDS who were calling for treatment as ‘agents of pharmaceutical companies’. ANC Youth League leaders such as Zizi Kodwa compared AIDS activists to the Afrikaner right wing group, the Broederbond and the vigilante-style People Against Gangsterism And Drugs (PAGAD).