Page 70 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

The leak itself and then the official release of the report let loose a war of words,
with the ANC, Tshabalala-Msimang, government departments and agencies, and
AIDS deniers either rejecting it or calling it into question, while Makgoba and the
BODRU team strongly maintained its validity and pointed out, very properly, that
they were state, not government employees. ‘This is the best report that has come
out of this organisation’, Makgoba announced. ‘The findings, and the quality of the
56
findings, of the report are unshakeable at the moment’, he added. They ensured that
57
‘reality becomes reduced to understandable levels through the power and force of
science’, he declared.
58
Unimpressed, Mbeki denied that the statistics on which BODRU had based its
conclusions were adequate or a reason to roll out antiretroviral therapy, leading to one
newspaper reporting that he was threatening to withdraw funding from the MRC if
it did not toe his line, a story which the President’s Office firmly denied. Dismayed,
59
the chairperson of the MRC’s Board, Professor Taole Mokoena, asked, ‘Were people
in high office willing to destroy the credibility of a respected body such as the MRC
simply because of political and personal agendas?’
60
Staff at the MRC were left unnerved and the atmosphere at ‘Medicina’ tense;
their confidence and the autonomy of the MRC itself were being eroded, Makgoba
recognized. The witch-hunt for the leaker had produced a ‘crisis in trust’, he
61
admitted, but he believed that the MRC staff were reassured that ‘they had a leader
62
who would stand up for science’. In retrospect, he himself claimed that ‘I didn’t
63
worry about the noise and was not intimidated’, so sure was he of his scientific
ground. ‘I have the greatest dislike … for political interference, and manipulation
64
of scientific research and in the running of scientific institutions’, he asserted
determinedly at the time. 65
Even so, once the forensic inquiry had exonerated MRC staff from leaking the
report, the ad hominem accusations levelled at Makgoba and his MRC must have
been the last straw in his souring relationship with Mbeki. In April 2002 a senior
ANC member, Peter Mokaba, publicly accused Makgoba of being ‘a very low-grade
politician … [who] had allowed himself to be used by anti-government forces [which
had] … put him in front as their leader on the HIV matter’. At the same time
66
an anonymous document (probably penned by Mokaba and Mbeki himself ) was
67
circulated at a meeting of the ANC’s National Executive Committee, pillorying the
MRC for being ‘devoted … to the propagation of the faith about HIV/AIDS and
the marketing of anti-retroviral drugs. The public servants working at the MRC
have still to explain why they seem so little interested in the overwhelming majority
of diseases that afflict the poor. Could it be the same reasons as those influencing the

63