Socialist Action /July 2001
South Africa's Mbeki Promotes Bush Agenda;
Ducks UN AIDS Conference
By GERRY FOLEY
South African President Thabo Mbeki's June 25 White
House visit with George Bush shattered a few more illusions that Mbeki's
African National Congress (ANC) government represents the interests of the
South African people.
The Mbeki-Bush meeting was widely reported in the
capitalist media. A June 25 CBS interview had Mbeki urging "stability"
on the African continent to "guarantee the safety of foreign [imperialist]
investments."
In order to achieve this stability and demonstrate
a "credible commitment to peace," as well as "democratic
and responsible behavior," Mbeki pledged to "mechanize" and
otherwise update South Africa's armed forces to improve their capacity for
intervention as "peacekeepers" in the sub-Saharan region.
"Stability" and "peacekeeping"
are code words in diplomatic parlance for intervention and counterrevolution,
wherein social movements that mobilize to fight for independence from imperialist
domination and control are slated to be undermined and smashed, neo-colonial
style, with the brute force of imperialist-sponsored armies.
The virtual state of war in much of Africa today
is the product of imperialist rivalries played out by corrupt hirelings
in the pay of this or that world capitalist power. The process of the recolonization
of Africa reveals the fever pitch that global competition has reached in
the struggle for control of Africa's vital natural resources-especially
its mineral wealth.
Bush's courting of Mbeki is designed to promote
U.S. capitalist interests in Africa as against those of its European competitors.
Mbeki's central aim in the Bush encounter was to secure U.S. investment
in South Africa's failing economy to further the interests of South Africa's
overwhelmingly white ruling class. The ANC government has long ceased to
project the radical nationalist image that brought it to power in South
Africa's 1994 elections, which registered the end of apartheid rule.
Default over AIDS crisis
Bush and Mbeki were noticeable non-participants
in the concurrent UN conference on AIDS, where the profiteering policies
of the world's dominant drug companies came under some scrutiny but where
the adopted "Declaration of Commitment," according to the June
27 New York Times, was "in no way enforceable by the international
community."
Pressed to explain their glaring absence, Bush
bragged that the paltry $200 million the U.S. contributed to worldwide AIDS
relief was the largest of any nation, while Mbeki alluded to his government's
policy that poverty, not the HIV virus, is the direct cause of AIDS. Mbeki
is the only world leader who subscribes to this scientifically discredited
notion.
As a result, South Africa, the richest country
in sub-Saharan Africa, has stood impotent in the face of a plague whose
victims would otherwise have access to life-prolonging medications. South
Africa has the largest number of HIV-positive citizens in the world. At
4.7 million infected people, almost 25 percent of the adult population is
HIV-positive. Lacking even the most minimal access to today's relatively
effective drug therapies, not to mention basic medical facilities, the country
faces a death sentence for millions.
Bush's posturing as a world leader in the fight
against AIDS didn't sit well with those familiar with U.S. policy. An international
rebuke had recently forced the World Trade Organization to back off an action
brought against the Brazilian government, at the behest of Washington, to
prevent Brazil from distributing free to its 100,000 HIV-infected citizens
all of the 14 anti-HIV virus drugs developed by its own pharmaceutical industries.
U.S. drug companies had similarly been pressed
to drop a law suit against those in South Africa who threatened to use low-cost
generic drugs rather than the patented and unaffordable drugs offered by
U.S. companies.
In truth, the dropping of these actions is usually
accompanied by semi-secret government side agreements with the dominant
global pharmaceutical companies to use their high-priced drugs at reduced
but still unaffordable prices.
Indeed, so-called competition between the leading
drug manufacturers has in some cases reduced corporate price-fixing so that
countries like India can now offer a year's HIV therapy for $295 as opposed
to $360, or even $1200. For the vast majority of India's HIV population
all three figures are beyond their reach.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was compelled to
extend Bush's $200 million boast by insisting that it was just an "initial"
contribution. In the face of 44 million HIV-positive people in the world,
25 million in Africa, capitalism has relegated the debate over life itself
to negotiations about patent rights and price. Brazil is threatened with
expulsion from the WTO for the "crime" of providing free live-saving
medications to its citizens.
ANC multi-millionaires
South Africa is a prime example of a nation at
an impasse. Its capitalist government and leaders, largely Black men like
Mbeki, and before him Nelson Mandela, are today the Black mask on the white
face of capitalist plunder.
The wealth of the nation, its farms, factories,
mines and other resources, not to mention its military and police are owned
and controlled by the same exploiters who ruled under apartheid.
A handful of ANC men formally head the government,
while a handful of others seek more profitable employment in the capitalist
class itself.
Cyril Ramaphosa, for example, the chief Black spokesperson
for Mbeki's much touted "Black empowerment" program-that is, Black
capitalism-was the former general secretary of the ANC and before that the
head of the powerful National Union of Mineworkers. Ramaphosa was among
the ANC's chief negotiators with the apartheid government in drawing up
today's South African constitution, which guarantees the sanctity of private
property, past and present, and therefore perpetuation of the economic rule
of the former apartheid elite.
Jay Naidoo, the former leader of the ANC-led Congress
of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and a communications minister in
the first ANC government, left his posts to form an information technology
corporation. Joe Modie, the former commander of the ANC's guerrilla unit,
Umkhonto we Sizwe, and a government defense minister, has turned to directing
a corporation that seeks military contracts with the government.
These three men, as well as other ANC tops, have
become multi-millionaires-their reward for donning the Black mask of white
capitalist rule.
Mbeki himself champions Black capitalism; his 1999
remarks at the Black Management Forum were explicit: "As part of the
realization of the aim to eradicate racism in our country, we must strive
to create and strengthen a Black capitalist class." Mbeki considered
this to be "an important part of the process of the deracialization
of the ownership of productive property in our country."
In the name of anti-racism, South Africa's puppet
rulers enrich themselves at the expense of the oppressed and exploited masses.
Their vision is focussed exclusively on what is possible in the framework
of a world system in decline, a system that has reduced Africa and much
of the underdeveloped world to an unprecedented state of decay and horror.
In this context, it is instructive to compare South
Africa, rich in mineral resources and Africa's most industrially developed
nation, with revolutionary Cuba. Despite the U.S. blockade, Cuba maintains
one of the most effective health care systems in the world. Its HIV rate
is the lowest in the world; its ratio of doctors to people is the best in
the world; and medical care is free. Its government has focussed a large
portion of its resources not only to providing first-class AIDS treatment
and education programs, but to vital AIDS research designed to find a cure.
In the framework of capitalism, AIDS and HIV provide
a market for price-fixed drugs and billions in profits. Obtaining a cure
runs counter to the inherent profit drive of a rapacious system that would
destroy the world in the name of maintaining its competitive status.
Placing profit before human needs is fundamentally
irrational and insane. A cure for AIDS is entirely within the reach of a
world that spends trillions on weapons of war and conquest. Ninety percent
of the world's scientists are engaged in war-related research or research
designed to extract the maximum profit for the capitalist few.
This in itself is justification for removing the
capitalist system from the face of the earth. And that is the job of the
emerging generation of youthful fighters who stand appalled as capitalist
globalization reduces the planet to ruin.
Socialist Action /July 2001 |