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'Infuriated' Dr No stalls AIDS funding to KZN
Jo-Anne Smetherham Daily News, June 12 2002. Reprinted courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
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Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang plans to stall an R800-million grant to fight the AIDS pandemic in KwaZulu-Natal because "proper application procedures were not followed".
The grant was approved by the Global Fund for AIDS , Tuberculosis and Malaria in April.
However, according to Tshabalala-Msimang's spokesperson Sibani Mngadi, KwaZulu-Natal health authorities "did not follow proper procedure" by applying for the money independently rather than through a government body.
The leaders of the KwaZulu-Natal bid would be asked to send a second application to the Global Fund, Mngadi said.
The health department's Jo-Anne Collinge said KwaZulu-Natal had broken the "cardinal rule" that Global Fund applications should be channelled through a national structure.
"Unless the country is very dysfunctional and unable to get organised, for example, in a situation of war or conflict, this co-ordinating mechanism should not be bypassed. So I don't see why the fund should have granted the money," she said.
The devastation of HIV and AIDS has been compared to a war in several statements by South African doctors and scientists, who have called upon the government to take more drastic measures to save lives.
Prominent doctors in KwaZulu-Natal expressed their outrage at this decision, which, they said, would cause a delay in the payout of the grant. It showed that the health minister saw "protocol as more important than saving lives".
"Why fiddle with procedure when we have such a big problem?" said one doctor, who asked not to be named. "The province got its act together, yet again South Africa is going to look stupid - as happened with the debate about what causes AIDS and whether we should use Nevirapine to prevent babies getting AIDS from their mothers."
KwaZulu-Natal, with an HIV/AIDS prevalence of 33 percent, is the worst affected province. Doctors estimate that 600 people with AIDS die in the province every day. "It's the equivalent of dropping a bomb on a high school every day," said John Wright, the KwaZulu-Natal health department's training and development chief, quoted in the South African Medical Journal.
The national government was also awarded a grant of R950-million by the Global Fund. According to the SA Medical Journal, the provincial bid was seen by the Global Fund as superior to the national bid, and "carried" the national bid through the approval process.
Tshabalala-Msimang had been "infuriated" to learn about the superiority of the KwaZulu-Natal bid, the journal reported.
Mngadi said the KwaZulu-Natal bid leaders were asked by the minister to withdraw their application. They tried to do this, but were too late and the bid was approved.
Bid leader Umesh Lalloo, head of the department of medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, would only say negotiations with government were "at a sensitive stage". |
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KZN - Durban Metro Council (Durban, Phoenix, Umlazi, Pinetown etc)
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