Aids epidemic is Mbeki’s legacy to South Africa

As Thabo Mbeki's dying presidency disintegrated into farce this week, South Africans expressed their shock at the way he has been treated by the African National Congress, the party he joined as a teenager. But the outgoing president must not be allowed to live down the stark fact he is to blame for something much, much worse than the current chaos within the upper ranks of the ANC.

For Thabo Mbeki is ultimately responsible for the deaths of many of the 1,100 South Africans who are dying from Aids every day. A Balkan warlord charged with one-tenth of the number of deaths Mbeki is responsible for would face trial at The Hague.

Walk into a government building in many African countries and you will find baskets of condoms, left to be taken for free. Advertising billboards advise you how to protect yourself from the virus, and promote the twin virtues of chastity and latex. In several countries, Aids is the issue confronting the government.

But no such urgency has been apparent in South Africa, where the government has seemed, at best, ambivalent about the epidemic that has erupted on its watch.

In After the Party, his fascinating memoir of a white ANC member's loss of faith in the new South Africa, Andrew Feinstein advances an intriguing theory about Mbeki's intellectual development. As the son of Govan Mbeki, the jailed ANC and communist activist, young Thabo was sent into exile in Britain as a teenager to be groomed as a future South African leader.

A precocious boy, Thabo took to wearing tweed jackets and smoking a pipe, and believed he was destined for the dreamy quads or courts of Oxbridge. But both the ancient universities turned him down, and Thabo had to make do with red brick, left-wing Sussex, which he thought beneath him, and where his tweedy image struck the wrong note in the 1960s. Ever since that snub, Mbeki has been something of an intellectual show-off.

As president, it was his custom to write a weekly email to party members, the majority of whom were mystified by his clunking references to WB Yeats and obscure Western and African philosophers. Friends said he sat up late alone, sipping whisky and surfing the internet, conditions which can make the brain vulnerable to sloppy thinking.

All of us waste time reading nonsense on the internet, but the material Mbeki found there was literally lethal. The ramblings of the kookiest American Aids denialists became South African medical policy. Mbeki endorsed a quack home-grown remedy called Virodene, ordering sceptical medical authorities to conduct human trials even though its active ingredient turned out to be an industrial solvent of no use in killing the HIV virus.

Simultaneously, Mbeki railed at Western pharmaceutical companies for profiteering by selling gullible African governments "useless" anti-retroviral drugs. Those who said HIV caused Aids were somehow guilty of racial stereotyping for Mbeki was sure the deaths were due to malnutrition and squalor, not unsafe African sexual practices.

Grudgingly, limited programmes of ARV drugs have been initiated, but the effort is tardy and inadequate. As Aids becomes in most countries more a treatable condition and less a death sentence, the 5.5m infected South Africans are dying needlessly; most depressingly, there are 500,000 new cases a year, 100,000 of them children.

It would be reassuring to think that if and when Jacob Zuma takes over the presidency things will improve, but that's unlikely. During his trial for the rape of a young family friend who was HIV positive, Zuma conceded he had sex with her, and successfully convinced the court that it was consensual.

Asked if he was not worried he might have contracted the virus by having unprotected sex with the woman, Zuma replied that though he had not used a condom, he took the precaution of taking a shower afterwards. ·