Opposition takes Mbeki to task

2003-02-17 18:56

Cape Town - Opposition political parties took President Thabo Mbeki to task on Monday, criticising his government mainly on Aids, Iraq, Zimbabwe, corruption, and unemployment.

Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon said the government's response to the Aids tragedy had been "one long denial".

"We are watching one of the most extraordinary calamities in human history: the wiping out of millions of people, in peacetime, by a known cause that has a known treatment," he said in the National Assembly during debate on Mbeki's state of the nation address.

Leon said government could stop mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and could treat people with free antiretrovirals, but "was being held back by a paralysing lack of political courage".

"Our war is being fought in the wards of Chris Hani-Baragwanath (hospital), not on the streets of Baghdad," he said.

Leon said that when apartheid fell, almost ten years ago, South Africa had declared its new foreign policy would be based on a commitment to human rights and democracy around the world.

Human rights abuses

However, the country had allowed human rights abuses to continue for three years in neighbouring Zimbabwe, while in Iraq, the government had criticised the "warlike stance" of the United States, but said nothing about the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, Leon said.

Inkatha Freedom Party leader and Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi said he was deeply concerned about the rising levels of poverty in South Africa, and by the fact that Mbeki had not adequately addressed Aids in his speech on Friday, when it should be the main concern.

"Everyday, I cannot think of anything but HIV/Aids, and my conscience is torn to pieces because I know that we are not doing enough to deal with the issue.

"Our people are dying, not by the hundreds or the thousands, but by the tens of thousands."

It was saddening that foreign countries were more concerned about the war on Aids than some of the government's own representatives, he said.

United Democratic Movement president Bantu Holomisa said the day of reckoning on Aids was fast approaching.

In the past year alone, tens of thousands of people had died from the disease, but still the government remained in contempt of a Constitutional Court ruling to provide anti-retroviral treatment, he said.

New National Party parliamentary leader Boy Geldenhuys appealed to Mbeki to help protect South African-owned properties and investments in Zimbabwe.

The president should use his influence to fast-track a bilateral agreement to protect South African assets in that country.

He said Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma had indicated in a letter to the NNP that this could be the best way of helping those investors.

African Christian Democratic Party leader Kenneth Meshoe said South Africans did not know what help Mbeki was giving the people of Zimbabwe, except the "perceived protection and defence of dictatorship, tyranny and the abuse of human rights" in that country.

No normal country

The DA's Raenette Taljaard urged Mbeki to act decisively against corruption, saying his government lacked sound ethics, moral authority and a political will to act.

"Sweep away the cobwebs of corruption and conflicts of interest that plight this government.

"Failure to act will see a false dawn to the 'second decade of freedom' and render it a freedom deferred," she said.

Freedom Front leader Pieter Mulder said South Africa's youth had to be freed from unfair affirmative action within the next decade.

This year's matriculants went to school in 1992, when the ANC had already been unbanned for two years.

"When is South Africa going to become a normal country? A country where the Constitution's provision stating 'no discrimination based on race' is true?" he asked.

United Christian Democratic Party leader Sipho Mfundisi said that in pushing back the frontiers of poverty, the country should not be turned into a welfare state.

"Our dictum is that people should live by the sweat of their brows," he said.

Labour intensive projects and programmes should be put in place so that people earned their living.

"We propose that mechanisation in digging trenches for laying down pipes for reticulation of water should be done away with; people should be employed instead," he said.

- SAPA