Present Tensed

“As a for­mer ANC party hack and thabo apol­o­gist you should find this very intrigu­ing. it’s 14 pages, so make sure you double-side it. I was just think­ing an inter­est­ing theme in this arti­cle is “the exile.” in the talk by Achmat he said he thought that Thabo spent too much time in Eng­land and that he had a vision of Africa which did not want to see Afi­cans as dis­eased and with their hands out­streched for help, par­tic­u­larly from The West — which I thought was inter­est­ing. In my Africa class we briefly dis­cussed the idea of the exile hav­ing a “purer” vision of their cul­ture, coun­try, strug­gle, rel­gion, etc.

I thought it was an inter­est­ing com­pli­ment to the “authen­tic­ity” issues we’ve dis­cussed on pre­vi­ous occa­sions. I think this is an inter­est­ing theme in that we often envi­son our­selves as “exiles” in one way or another, and con­struct a vision of the world through that optic.”

A few pre­lim­i­nar­ies here:

• SD’s work­ing on some papers on Post-Colonial Africa at Colum­bia, and will be con­tribut­ing some insight to this web­page as we review the first 10 years of free­dom in South Africa.
• I could write an entire reg­u­lar weblog just on Thabo Mbeki and the ANC (if not SA). I am still sub­scribed to the ANC mail­ing list, and keep track of hap­pen­ings that side to the best of my abil­i­ties. If I wasn’t so much of a gen­er­al­ist, I very might take this on. As it is I’d be happy to con­tribute to this kind of initiative.
• I was an apol­o­gist for Thabo Mbeki for quite a while. It’s not the eas­i­est posi­tion to defend, par­tic­u­larly when you keep com­pany with do-gooders. But, I felt that the prag­matic under­pin­nings of his argu­ments were being dis­missed too quickly (read the linked arti­cle for a good recount­ing of the story) and that the feel good “right answer” was too obvi­ous. In a nut­shell, Mbeki didn’t want to sub­si­dize anti-retroviral treat­ments for the HIV+ folks in SA at the 97–98 costs. Big Pharma’s patents would turn those costs into some­thing like $14 per day per per­son for 1/4 of the pop­u­la­tion. This is prob­lem­atic because:
  1. It would bank­rupt the country,
  2. cre­ate a tremen­dous depen­dency on the drug corps and/or “the West”, and
  3. the drugs didn’t actu­ally cure any­thing, so you’d be pay­ing for the right to pay more.And to live.

  The con­ven­tional do-gooder argu­ment was that you tried to save life as long as you could by what­ever means you had, and then you’d find ways to do it more effi­ciently. Mbeki appeared to be unre­lent­ing in fig­ur­ing out an effi­cient way to make it hap­pen. I sup­ported him to this point.

  Then things got out of hand. The Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion and big pharma were finally shamed into low­er­ing their costs and/or drop­ping the fight against the import­ing of generic drugs which dropped those $14 per day costs to $7 and then finally to under $2 per day per per­son. Still a cost, but sig­nif­i­cantly alter­ing the eco­nomic argu­ments against pro­vid­ing anti-retroviral treat­ments for the ill [Note: A friend of mine, at MSF has writ­ten about access to essen­tial med­i­cines].

  I fig­ured that Mbeki could say he won his fight against the multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions, and mer­rily roll out some kind of grad­u­ated pro­gram for treat­ment. To some degree he did this, the prob­lem of course was that along the way he grasped on to the idea that poverty and a poor infra­struc­ture are con­tribut­ing fac­tors to AIDS — and made sev­eral bold state­ments that AIDs is not nec­es­sar­ily caused by a virus (HIV). Again, he might have been able to get away with this had he not embraced a group of dis­si­dent “sci­en­tists”, which of course only under­mined his cred­i­bil­ity (the shame is that Mbeki may be one of the most “qual­i­fied” peo­ple to ever take a pres­i­den­tial office). The other con­se­quences were also severe: his state­ments fur­ther con­fused a pop­u­la­tion that is strug­gling to come to terms with an oft-mysterious epi­demic. It also put saint Man­dela on oppo­site ends with the cur­rent ANC lead­er­ship on the most seri­ous issue of the day… and that’s not even tak­ing an account­ing for the lives lost dur­ing this time.

  Mbeki has taken steps to put things right (and to save face) & is all but assured of being elected to a sec­ond 5-year term this year. Hope­fully, he’ll decide not to keep a grudge and will make good deci­sions going forward.

hm.. of course, I meant to write about exiles and emi­grants… imag­i­nary home­lands & places you can never go back to.

or did I?