How the TAC began
2005-11-29 11:42
Special Report
Aids has now killed 25m people around the world, but the number of new infections is slowing sharply, the UN says.
Fienie Grobler
Johannesburg - Seven years ago, passers-by barely glanced at a handful of protesters on the steps of a Cape Town cathedral, unaware that they were witnessing the birth of Africa's most powerful Aids lobby group.
By the end of that day, on 10 December 1998, the small group - including a 66-year-old grandmother, a medical student and a human rights activist, had collected some 1 000 signatures supporting their cause.
They were the first members of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a non-governmental organisation led by anti-apartheid and gay rights activist Zackie Achmat, which aimed to spread the news that cheap HIV/Aids drugs do exist.
"It was clear by late 1998 that nobody was doing or saying anything about treatment and that we needed to create a movement led primarily by people affected by HIV directly," said one of its founders, Mark Heywood.
Today, President Thabo Mbeki's government has started to provide drugs to Aids sufferers at state hospitals, and TAC's new mission is to take aim at companies that do not yet have treatment programmes for their workers.
When it started, its main aims were to get pharmaceuticals to drop their prices, and to put pressure on the ruling African National Congress (ANC), voted into power in the first post-apartheid elections in 1994, to give free Aids drugs at state hospitals.
"It grew also out of our kind of political beliefs about what the new South Africa should mean for people in terms of dignity, access to healthcare and equality," Heywood, a former anti-apartheid activist said.
TAC's beginnings
TAC's lobbying started at a time when South Africa was slowly waking up to the disease, which now affects about one in seven people, or around 6.5 million, according to figures released by the health ministry in July.
HIV prevalence in South Africa rocketed from less than one percent in 1990 to almost 25% in 2000, according to UNAIDS.
"We led a march to the International Aids Conference in December 2000, there were 5 000 people in that march, we caught everyone's attention. TAC took off from there," recalled policy coordinator Nathan Geffen.
It now has 250 branches across the country, some 12 000 members on its database, and its annual budget has increased from around R200 000 ($30 000) in its early years to the current R25m, the money coming mainly from international donors.
Zackie Achmat
In 2000, Achmat, TAC's HIV-positive leader, travelled to Thailand to buy 5 000 tablets of a generic version of anti-Aids drugs and smuggled them into South Africa.
He had bought them at a price 66 times cheaper than what pharmaceuticals were charging in South Africa.
The next year, pharmaceutical companies, facing immense public pressure, decided to drop court action challenging a new law allowing the import of generic Aids medicine.
Around the same time TAC also won a protracted legal battle with the government, forcing the state to provide free Aids drugs to HIV-pregnant women at state hospitals.
But the government was still not taking any steps to distribute drugs to all HIV sufferers, despite countless protests, meetings with the health minister and a short-lived disobedience campaign.
Then, in November 2003, the cabinet approved a plan for the national rollout of anti-retroviral drugs for all HIV sufferers.
The government, which is struggling to meet its deadlines on this plan, estimated some 78 000 people to be on treatment by the end August this year.
"I think we should all be doing much more. The country as a whole is way behind in dealing with the Aids epidemic," said Heywood, explaining that TAC would join forces with church leaders and unionists next year to lobby companies to step up Aids programmes for workers.
"We will be pulling our resources together... to put particular pressure on the South African industry and multinationals to play their part in making sure workplaces have proper treatment strategies at work."
- AFP