STENCH OF A PARTY WITH
TOO MUCH POWER - 5

Health Minister Dr Zuma has sought to address this staffing crisis by two main strategies. One, to send students from under-privileged areas to study medicine in Cuba, the theory being that once qualified they would be more willing to serve in poor areas. According to the Dean of the University of Natal Medical School, about 208 doctors could have been afforded full bursaries at SA universities for the R500 000 cost of sending 52 disadvantaged students to Cuba. By November at least eight had returned without completing their degrees.

Secondly, in 1998 the Health Ministry passed legislation introducing compulsory community service for new medical graduates. However, the provinces did not have the funds to pay these doctors, The consequence was that experienced doctors were replaced by the recently graduated ones, leading to a further brain drain in the public service.

AIDS. The RDP promised that "a programme to combat AIDS must include the active and early treatment of these diseases at all health facilities, plus mass education programmes which involve the mass media, schools, and community organisations."

The government's AIDS programme has been a dismal failure. In an article comparing different national approaches to AIDS, The Economist headlined its section on SA with "How to Dither and Die." According to one doctor AIDS has spread through SA as if no preventive measures at all had been taken.

Dr Zuma recently scrapped a pilot programme to give AZT to pregnant mothers, which reduces AIDS infections in infants by 50%. This money, she argued, could better be spent on changing behaviour in high risk groups. But South Africans could well ask what has happened to these programmes. The government has an abundance of plans and strategies, but none of them seems to reach implementation level. The Department of Health is coming under increasing criticism for its implementation failures.

Mention of AIDS in a political speech is rare, or references so vague and evasive as to be meaningless. AIDS experts say that government AIDS campaigns have been marred by lack of leadership, poor programme management, low levels of implementation and scandals such as Sarafina II and Virodene. Mary Crewe of the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan AIDS programmes describes the government as giving "no vision, no inspiration, no plans, no leadership. Nothing beyond vague generalities have been placed on the agenda for over a decade."

And so this really desperate, dreadful account of stubborn, denied failure goes on and relentlessly on, page after page of accusation of broken promises, of non-delivery, of a magnificent country in ruins. At the end of it all, you just think, with sorrow, of Jim Peron's telling title of his new book, Die, The Beloved Country. If only this DP paper could be read and, above all, understood by every voter in the country. But that, alas, will not happen.

PERHAPS the saddest part of growing old is the part where old grudges and jealousies re-surface in the idleness of retirement and return to haunt the mind. Ken Owen, whose incisive and stimulating political analyses throughout the death throes of the old regime made our Sundays bearable, now writes a rather sad little weekly column for the Independent group, under the depressing title, "Dropping Out."

The title refers, one gathers, to the fact that he no longer cares a fig (to put it politely) having lost his influential position as the country's top editor and must now live, disgruntled and disconsolate, in retirement in the barrenness of a Cape paradise. We should all be so lucky.

The dropped-out Owen has now informed the depleted readership his column enjoys in the back pages of the magazine section of the Friday edition that he intends to vote for the ANC in the upcoming general election. Given his lifelong antipathy to the ideology which underpins the ANC and its legions, his curious decision, in our view, can only have been arrived at for one reason. He is tired of being ignored and would like to see his name back on the front page for a change.

This fleeting triumph has been bought at great cost because, lacking any other plausible excuse, Owen chose to blame his bizarre decision on a long-felt resentment against an old rival, Nigel Bruce. Bruce obviously beat Owen to the punch when he, with great fanfare, announced his intention to run with the DP. Bruce, according to his "amiable colleague" (Owen) is infected by an "innate political conservatism," an "air of patrician certainty," "a fastidious distaste for the mob" and a "lofty contempt for error and human weakness."

Owen, on the other hand, presents himself as a "low-born scruff" … "blowing the salt" in Bruce's "meritocratic world." What a load of cant and what a tragedy that a man of Owen's intellectual calibre should stoop to it. But, alas, there was more.

Owen is also incensed by the Unspeakable Tony (Leon), whose offence is that he is "insensitive and hostile to the Black masses." Since this is far too generalised a statement to defend in the few lines available to him in his limited column, Owen seizes on poor Tony's reckless faith in his public relations gurus who are charging the DP good money to make a fool of its leader by presenting him to an incredulous public in the guise of a white-collar pugilist. Owen prefers the term "cocky little bantam."

We agree that Tony shouldn't pay his image builders a blue cent till they have removed every offending poster and made a public apology to the electorate. But this tactical blunder has nothing to do with what Leon stands for: and Owen well knows it. The DP has opposed the ANC tenaciously and effectively in the past, not because it has moved to the far right but because it has persistently sought to expose the fraudulent claims made by the ANC to an unsophisticated and racially hyped-up electorate that it represents the interests of the masses.

In fact, as its deplorable record indicates, it seeks only to extend its grip on power and to entrench the privileges of a small elite of former activists and their sycophantic adherents. This is the party Owen now supports because he is "a liberal"! Perhaps more tellingly, he "wants no part of the White man's burden." Dropping out ?