Page 69 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

Tshabalala-Msimang, had tried to pressure Makgoba into amending his views, not
on specific scientific grounds, but out of loyalty to Mbeki himself and the African
Renaissance, but in vain. Even a personal attack by the President on those who ‘have
achieved and seek to obtain public prominence, on the basis of leading an extremely
harmful and unacceptable campaign to deny our people all information and knowledge
about the incidence of diseases of poverty in our country’ did not alter Makgoba’s
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view. Instead, he averred that the Government’s ‘dabbling with scientifically
unproven ideas’ and its ‘Soviet-style approach to science’ would result in scientists
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being associated with ‘genocide against humans, and that day is not far away’.
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Characteristically, he insisted, ‘Look at the evidence. It’s not about who’s in charge of
this country, it’s about what the evidence is saying.’ 49
By virtue of his position as president of the MRC, Makgoba’s stance was taken as
that of the Council too, prompting Tshabalala-Msimang to caution that, ‘as a statutory
institution which receives a substantial grant from the government’, it should be seen
to be ‘more of a partner than a competitor or even an opponent of government’.
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Accordingly, it soon came into Mbeki’s firing line as well, especially after its Burden
of Disease Research Unit (BODRU) had deepened its analysis of the country’s adult
mortality statistics (which Makgoba had cited in 2000) to conclude that the rising
number of young adult deaths was essentially a consequence of HIV/AIDS, not
violence and diseases of poverty as Mbeki claimed. Moreover, based on these figures,
its report (with a preface by Makgoba) alarmingly projected that by 2010 the total
number of AIDS deaths in South Africa would reach 5–7 million if no effective
treatment was provided. The report would be ‘a huge embarrassment’ to Mbeki, an
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ANC insider feared. 52
Taken aback, Tshabalala-Msimang barred the release of the report until, she said,
her department had studied it closely and parallel investigations into the mortality
statistics by the Department of Home Affairs and Statistics South Africa could be
completed. Once more she berated the MRC for allowing its staff ‘who are themselves
government employees’, to have taken up ‘a hostile position vis-à-vis the government,
and it will be necessary for this situation to be attended to’. Her anger – and
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presumably Mbeki’s – towards the MRC rose even further when the MRC’s report
was leaked to the press a few weeks later. Outraged, she demanded that a forensic
inquiry be held to discover who was responsible. Embarrassed, the Board of the MRC,
to which the Government had by then appointed several pliable members, agreed.
‘Minister orders a witch hunt’, headlined the Cape Times. The MRC had not been
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set up as ‘a government agency to work against and in competition with government’,
she warned. 55

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