Columnist and author Jacob Dlamini (Native Nostalgia) is not short of opinions, and his vervy, punchy delivery makes them hard to ignore. Here is piece he wrote for Business Day about the scourge of South Africa – HIV/AIDS – and the man many want to hold responsible, Thabo Mbeki. It would seem that Dlamini is in at least partial agreement with Jonny Steinberg’s assessment that SA’s former president has had to take on more than his fair share of villainisation:
PRINCE opens his song Sign o’ the Times with a line about a skinny man from France who “died of a big disease with a little name/By chance his girlfriend came across a needle/And soon she did the same”. The big disease with a little name is AIDS. It has felled the big and the small, the mighty and the weak, the rich and the poor, men and women, the young and the old. Its effect on SA has been, well, big.
AIDS is also the disease whose history will always be accompanied by a footnote about former president Thabo Mbeki ’s dalliance with denialism.
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