Mbulelo Mzamane - a weapon of mass distraction

A response to Mzamane’s "The Politics of Health in the New South Africa"

By Sipho Seepe

I accept Professor Mzamane’s insolent provocation with reluctance, mindful of the adage "don’t argue with a fool, because people might not notice or recognise the difference". However, my experience suggests that failure to challenge discredited and intellectual arguments tends to give them unjustified substance.

In his recent article "The Politics of Health in the New South Africa", a hodgepodge of racially motivated malevolence and hypocrisy, he adds to his other achievements the new mantle of the art of misrepresentation, distortion and intellectual dishonesty.

A benevolent reading of the article is that the dear professor is either confused or genuinely ignorant of the facts. Aside from its dishonesty, what is intriguing about Mzamane’s latest pseudo-intellectual escapade is that it comes at a time when the so-called HIV/Aids debate has run its course. A performance similar to that of a soldier that hides in the bunkers in the middle of a battle, only to emerge from the hiding place shooting randomly when the war is over – with the possibility of causing serious harm to himself.

Making his contribution to the cacophony of non-debates, Mzamane makes, among others, four critical points. These underscore Mzamane’s confusion, ignorance, if not glaring intellectual bankruptcy. I respond to some of these points.

Point 1: "the difference [over the HIV/Aids debate] between the Mbeki government and its critics lies in the fact that the government wants to pursue the 'public health' model of medicine and the opposition is assuming the 'individualised curative' model that dominated the Apartheid state. Virtually every other industrialised country in the world utilises the former, which is why they have universal health insurance."

Response: In his long-winded vain defense of Mbeki's position on HIV/Aids Mzamane repeatedly refers to the so-called public health model, yet he hardly explains what this model entails. Mzamane should know that every other industrialised country subscribes to the views shared by those he calls critics of Mbeki. No government in the industrialised world fraternises with the dissidents. This behaviour from Mbeki led him to being harangued everywhere he goes. He even earned himself a feature in Time magazine as a result. And the feature was not flattering.

At least we know how the government responds to the epidemic. Mzamane's response is fuzzy. For his part Mbeki appointed the SA National Aids Council whose dubious claim to fame is having excluded Aids researchers, Aids medical expertise and representatives of NGOs working with people living with Aids. Those on the cutting edge of Aids research, the likes of Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, Professor Jerry Coovadia (University of Natal), have argued that the Aids epidemic is unprecedented in medical history and the fact that the virus mutates rapidly makes it incredibly complex. Yet Mbeki prefers to appoint those whose erudition in scientific and medical matters is suspect, to advise government on how to respond to the epidemic.

We also know that the Mbeki government's public health model has led to South Africa becoming the country with the fastest growing incidence of HIV infection. In championing his 'public health model', which he claims is in sync with Mbeki's view, Mzamane cunningly inserts the word Apartheid to canvas racial sympathy – almost suggesting that the critics of Mbeki government’s stance suffer from an Apartheid hangover. In doing so, he mischievously omits to mention that the opposition to Mbeki's government stance includes the likes of Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Professor Makgoba, Professor Jerry Coovadia, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the SA Communist Party, the 16 000 strong South African Medical Association comprising black medical practitioners. These are individuals and organisations that you could hardly accuse of being sympathetic to the Apartheid state.

Regarding public health policy, Dr Kgosi Letlape, chairperson of the South African Medical Association, the doctors' trade union, certainly someone infinitely more medically qualified than Mbeki and his toadies, puts it more bluntly: "South Africa is the only country in the world that does not have a policy for the treatment of HIV/Aids. As such, millions of South Africans are dying from a disease for which there is treatment, albeit not a cure. Consequently, South Africa’s government, medical profession and society are effectively part of a system that is committing genocide."

Dr Letlape's words should send a chill down our spines: "The number of HIV/Aids-related deaths has been equated to dropping a bomb on a high school every day. The death tolls of South Africans in both world wars and the armed struggle against Apartheid pale in comparison to the numbers of those
killed by the deadly disease."

One only hopes that this reality will answer Mzamane’s other concern that the "righteous tone in the South African media was disturbing and their fixations distracting". Sacrificing lives for political expediency and opportunism should be sufficient reason for the media to be fixated. During Apartheid, the oppressed argued that one death is one too many. This moral approach should hold also in the new South Africa.

Point 2; "The reason why some people are not convinced that the HIV virus is the sole cause of Aids is that medical science is pretty sure that it is not – there is a co-virus involved or a co-factor (Maug II, 1996; Folkers, 1996)."

Response: For an academic to come up with such unadulterated nonsense should be grounds for dismissal. It is one thing to hold a different opinion, but to suggest that a view held by a minority on the fringes is representative of the whole medical science is academic mischief of the worst kind. That this simple fact escapes Mzamane is disturbing. Interestingly, Mzamane alludes to Galileo in describing Mbeki’s position. Does he understand that Galileo challenged the mainstream or orthodoxy of the time, and could therefore not be representative of a mainstream opinion?

Point 3; "The popular view on what the president and his ministers thought on HIV/Aids, even among congress alliance (ANC, SA Communist Party and Congress of SA Trade Unions) members was based largely on fallacious reporting, with journalists and columnists quick to ventriloquise government or score points for the opposition."

Mzamane wants us to believe that Mbeki's views were subjected to misrepresentation. Quite to the contrary, addressing a characteristically sycophantic ANC parliamentary group, Mbeki confidently declared that a "virus cannot cause a syndrome". Understandably, Mzamane is so focused on groveling for presidential attention that he fails to see a dissident position that stares him in the face. Motivating Mzamane is the instantaneous rewards that Mbeki is known to dish out to praise singers.

It is also a matter of record that Mbeki boldly asserted later in an interview with a foreign television station that a "syndrome is a collection of diseases". First year medical students know better. It is also a fact that the national executive committee of the ANC finally asked Mbeki to withdraw from the unhelpful non-debate. Unfortunately this came after the rest of the world had grown tired of the intellectual shenanigans surrounding the debate.

Lastly, given that hospitals and clinics are in the business of providing individualised care, should we assume that in Mzamane’s undefined public health model, these would disappear?

Point 4; "Quite apart from the fact that what [Seepe] says about Mbeki 'championing’ the cause of some discredited group of scientists is not true – Mbeki sought both orthodox and dissident views on the subject, in just the way Seepe recommends intellectuals should conduct themselves – he (Seepe) would deny Mbeki precisely the role he ascribes to intellectuals: 'a spirit of enquiry that is critical, and, if need be, oppositional' and fearlessness to 'confront orthodoxy and dogma'. But presumably, in Seepe's mind, one cannot be both a president and an intellectual. He (Seepe) passes himself in this way as the intellectual par excellence. All this verges on narcissism."

Response to 4: To assert that the president did not champion dissident views because he "sought both orthodox and dissident view on the subject" is dishonest. Mzamane seems to believe that bringing disagreeing groups under one roof can resolve scientific squabbles. While Mbeki may be excused for being an uninformed politician, it is disturbing when a professor advances the same misguided view.

Turning to Mbeki the intellectual. Mzamane exposes himself yet again. He is expected to know that intellectuals cannot perform a function of being critical and confronting orthodoxy and dogma on the basis of ignorance. Mbeki, through no fault of his own, started from a dangerously limited understanding of medical science. He is definitely no Galileo. Galileo was informed in his craft. It requires one to be highly informed in one’s discipline, probably more so in the sciences, before one can launch a different understanding or theory in the subject. It is not an accident that no politician has ever advanced a new scientific theory. Changes in scientific understanding have come from scientists themselves.

Scholars such as Professor David Attwell (University of Natal), Professor Patrick Bond (University of Witwatersrand), John Matshikiza and Howard Barrell (Mail & Guardian) to mention a few, have suggested that Mbeki often misreads or misunderstands texts that he quotes or refers to. Mbeki like Mzamane fails the test on intellectual rigour, honesty, integrity and consistency – attributes expected of intellectuals.

Attwell argued not long ago that Mbeki had misrepresented Disraeli in his "two nations" speech. In his novel Sybil, Or the Two Nations, Disraeli addressed class division in the context of racial and cultural unity, Mbeki talks about race. Disraeli’s thesis is an appeal for unity and a sense of common purpose, a point lost in Mbeki's version on race, which is not only politically divisive but has the effect of entrenching disunity. In the Frantz Fanon Memorial lecture at the University of Durban-Westville, Patrick Bond exposed Mbeki’s intellectual confusion. Bond pointed out that while Mbeki cites the likes of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, and Malcom X, Mbeki failed to realise that, unlike him, these intellectuals would have called for revolution against, not reform of, the Washington-centred world economy.

The remainder of Mzamane's piece is a mass of contradiction – and in the most stupefying way nullifying the very argument he sought to advance. The following can be gleaned from his article:

"Government only took a U-turn in its communication strategy following the case that was brought against by the Treatment Action Campaign, making treatment of HIV/Aids cases a human rights issue."

He continues: "Mbeki’s own undoing in the matter, it can be argued, was his uncompromising intellectual independence that blinded him for a while.Intellectuals of the highest caliber are humble people as well who concede their mistake in light of incontrovertible evidence – qualities that were in short supply between the president and his equally implacable opponents".

Unfortunately, Mzamane cannot heed his own advice. This is despite acknowledging that the government took a U-turn and lost cases in both the high court and the constitutional courts.

He writes: "Without doubt, there were blunders from the start in the way government launched its HIV/Aids campaign. The long drawn out battle between government and the Treatment Action Campaign verged on folly to roll out cost effective treatment for the purpose of reducing mother-to-child transmission. Admittedly, the government needed to take its cue from those who knew best."

Mzamane concludes his diatribe by advancing ad naseaum the link between poverty and diseases - this he presents as if it is disputed. This issue is so trite that it is rarely mentioned. Evidently Mzamane has inhabited a fictional world for too long. He has just woken up to what for most of the scientific and medical world is obvious.

In conclusion, far from displaying intellectual independence, and allowing himself to be persuaded by facts staring him in the face, Mzamane does the exact opposite. Instead he prefers to omit and disregard facts. He remains impervious to facts, reason and logic. He had not read any of the texts with the intention to learn anything from them. The result has been a display of a debilitating arrogance of not knowing that he does not know that which he does not know.

Professor Sipho Seepe is the acting vice-chancellor of Vista University and has been a regular columnist to the Mail & Guardian, the South African newspaper.