Health minister Aaron Motsoaledi on Thursday accused the media of dangerously inaccurate reporting on the effects of US President Donald Trump’s cuts to financial support for SA’s HIV/Aids programmes, likening it to AfriForum’s campaign to highlight what it says is discrimination against Afrikaners.
“I want to state clearly that propagating wrong information about the status of the HIV/Aids campaign in SA in the manner that is being done is no different from the approach adopted by AfriForum and its ilk, which led Trump to trash the whole country,” he told journalists on Thursday morning.
He appeared to be reacting to media reports on the impact of the cuts that have included details of the challenges facing HIV patients who had relied on services provided by US-funded organisations that have been forced to close.
Many of these patients used clinics that offered care to marginalised groups of people who face discrimination at public clinics, such as sex workers, injecting drug users and men who have sex with men.
“Simply because a problem is occurring, to go and announce that the HIV/Aids programme has collapsed is wrong,” said the minister.
He catalogued the government’s HIV/Aids activities across SA, saying the health department was making rapid progress with its campaign to provide treatment to people living with HIV who were not yet on therapy.
The campaign, launched in February, set a target of reaching 1.1- million people by December and had already provided treatment to more than 520,000 patients, he said.
Trump’s administration has since his inauguration in January slashed foreign aid worldwide. The cuts have hit SA particularly hard, since it has for decades received US funding for both HIV/Aids programmes and scientific research.
While SA funds more than 80% of its HIV/Aids programmes from the fiscus, it has nevertheless relied on substantial donor support provided in recognition of the size of its epidemic.
An estimated 7.9-million people are living with HIV in SA. The biggest donor thus far has been the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), which the minister previously said accounted for 17% of SA’s HIV/Aids expenditure.
The withdrawal of Pepfar grants that were administered by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has already forced the closure of programmes provided by nongovernmental organisations in 27 of SA’s 52 health districts, and led to more than 8,000 job losses, according the minister.
Pepfar grants administered by the Centres for Disease Control are still in place, but end in September.
Motsoaledi said he had conducted extensive work behind the scenes to try to secure new sources of funding to counter the US cuts, but to no avail.
He dismissed questions about the health department’s efforts to secure emergency funding from Treasury, saying there was no mechanism in the Public Finance Management Act to do so.
“I’ve been in government for [more than] 15 years now [and] I’ve never heard about emergency funding of this type,” he said.
The Treasury had asked the health department to submit 10 plans detailing the funding requirements of each province and the national health department after the cuts, but it was not for emergency funding, he said.
Section 16 of the Public Finance Management Act enables the provision of emergency funding outside SA’s usual budget process.
The mechanism was used during the Covid-19 pandemic, and Business Day previously reported the SA Medical Research Council has put in a bid for R400m in emergency funding to counter the termination of research grants from the US.
Health news agency Bhekisisa previously reported the health department was of the view that funding could be obtained either via a section 16 application or a budget adjustment.
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