'Aids is ANC's Achilles' heel'

2004-03-08 15:11

Durban - The African National Congress government's mismanagement of the HIV/Aids crisis remained its biggest failure and demanded its demise, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi said on Monday.

Launching the second phase of his party's election campaign in Durban, Buthelezi said in a prepared speech: "HIV/Aids is seen as our government's biggest policy failure."

He accused President Thabo Mbeki of wasting a "considerable amount of precious time" during the last parliamentary session "flirting" with revisionist theories which questioned whether the HI virus caused Aids, before finally withdrawing from the debate.

Buthelezi said HIV/Aids was of high priority to the IFP because South Africans saw it as serious.

He claimed that wherever he had gone, worldwide, over the past five years, leaders and ordinary people asked him what had gone wrong in South Africa regarding the pandemic.

"The South African people have the answer and must make their voice heard on April 14, because we just cannot have five more years of the same ambivalent, ineffective and negligent ANC policies," he said.

Buthelezi said about one person in eleven in South Africa was believed to be HIV-positive.

"HIV/Aids presents a national challenge as big as the one to defeat apartheid. The epidemic is a national emergency that requires a proportional response.

"It can be beaten. The resourcefulness, the gritty spirit and the character of the South African people, can ensure that we make the change together to overcome this dreadful disease," he said.

Buthelezi said South Africa needed an IFP-led government to bring "sanity", not only in the fight against HIV/Aids but also in respect of the crisis of crime, unemployment, poverty and corruption.

- SAPA