henjiwe Mtintso, 'deputy secretary general and the highest-ranking woman in the African National Congress, is an important voice for women in South Africa. She visited the United States in July and was interviewed by Key Martin and Gloria Rubae of the People's Video Network. Here we reprint some of what she said:
"The legacy of apartheid is such that it is going to take us a long time to actually reverse this, especially for the poor communities, particularly in the rural areas. And when you talk about the rural areas you are talking about women primarily, because they are the ones who tend to be left as men go into the urban areas to seek employment. And because of patriarchy,.. they are the ones who have got to take care of the sick. So the burden is primarily on the women..." "We have set in place primarily preventive and educational programmes. But you must also know that we are dealing with backward communities. The rate of illiteracy is high. Violence against women is strong. Wornen fear challenging their partners because they know the kind of violence that will erupt. So they succumb. A woman cannot force ner partner to use condonis. whether she is married or unmarried.
There has not been the politics of keeping to monogamous families in our societies, so you find that our men, and our young men, have more than one relationship. If the man is infected, it implies he infects five others. This is one of the reasons why you get a higher rate among women. There is also the belief that if men sleep with virgins or young women they get cured. Rape is on the increase. Because sexuality and sex education Despite the cant about "partnership", profits come before patients subjects that are still taboo in some of the rural families, you around trying to teach people have problems when you "It is in this context that our health department came up with the Medical Amendment Act, looking at the production of generic medicine, and what is called "parallel imports" as well as "forced licensing". All these practices, in our understanding, are within the World Trade Organisation regulations and the clause that deals with "intellectual property". Our aim here was to make medicine accessible to our poor people.
If companies like Glaxo, for example, were producing certain medicines abroad and selling them cheaper in Canada than they were selling them in South Africa, our minister should be able to order these medicines from Canada, which is a parallel import. And if people had patent rights to certain medicines, and either were not producing them or producing them expensively in South Africa, then the minister had a right to ask other companies to produce them cheaper.
In terms of prescription, if people were prescribing these expensive medicines, the health minister and the doctor and the patient had the right to go and get the cheaper medicine. These were some of the elements of this act that allowed our minister and our doctors to do that. The pharmaceuticals saw red. Their argument was that it was going to be pıracy. And it's not true. Their other argument was that we were going against TRIPS (the World Trade Organisation's rules on intellectual property rights), and that is not true. But the American government came fully behind these pharmaceuticals.
The truth of the matter is that it is profits that they are defending. So the lives of people are less valuable than the profits these big pharmaceuticals are going to be making in South Africa.
And now we are being taken to the Constitutional Court by the pharmaceuticals backed by the American government. We have not been able to implement the Medical Amendment Act.
Many of our people are in danger of dying because of a lack of access to cheaper medications. We are not dealing with only South Africa. It is a continental problem. Zimbabwe next door is in crisis. So any alternative access to cheaper medicines would benefit not only South Africa but the whole continent. But we are being denied that.
If the United States government could allow us to set in motion those processes and programmes that we think in our country would work for our people, then let us begin. But we are not being given that opportunity by either the US government or the pharmaceuticals.