Spend defence budget on AIDS - Cosatu
Friday, June 28, 2002 Patrick Leeman Daily News, June 28 2002. Reprinted courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
The general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), Mr Zwelinzama Vavi, said in Durban last night that he could not understand the hesitance of the government in supplying anti-retroviral drugs to people with HIV and AIDS.
He was speaking at a conference on HIV and AIDS organised by Cosatu and a non-governmental organisation, the Treatment Action Campaign.
Vavi said a larger proportion of the national budget should be devoted to the pandemic, even if this meant cutting back on the R50-billion defence budget.
"We need the importation of generic drugs to treat people with HIV and AIDS to be legalised," he said.
Vavi said very few companies had AIDS policies in place in the workplace and trade unions had not pushed them enough to institute such policies.
Pregs Govender, who was an ANC MP until the end of May this year and a former chair of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Status of Women, said the billions of rands ear-marked for defence were going to companies in Germany, Britain and Sweden instead of people in South Africa who were suffering from HIV and AIDS.
South Africa ought to use its rights in terms of the Medicines Act to produce good quality generics to treat HIV and AIDS infections, Govender said. She also said men need to reverse the patriarchal system responsible for women being infected by unfaithful male partners.
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