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TechnoratiCAPE TOWN, South Africa – In her AIDS-scarred South African township, Sweetness Mzolisa leads a chorus of praise for George W. Bush that echoes to the deserts of Namibia, the hills of Rwanda and the villages of Ethiopia.
(Photo: AP Images / Schalk van Zuydam)Aid worker Sweetness Mzolisa poses for a portrait at the Nocingile day care center in Khayelitsha, South Africa, Friday, Jan. 9, 2009. From a windowless shed in a sprawling South African township, Mzolisa leads a chorus of praise which reverberates from Namibia's desert to Rwanda's rolling hills in honor of an unlikely international hero: outgoing US President Bush.
Like countless Africans, Mzolisa looks forward to Barack Obama becoming America's first black president Jan 20. But — like countless Africans — Mzolisa says she will always be grateful to Bush for his war on AIDS, which has helped to treat more than 2 million Africans, support 10 million more, and revitalize the global fight against the disease.
"It has done a lot for the people of South Africa, for the whole of the African continent," says Mzolisa, a feisty mother of seven. "It has changed so many people's lives, saved so many people's lives."
Mzolisa, 44, was diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1999 and formed a women's support group to "share the pain." In 2004 she received a U.S. grant to set up office in a shipping container and start a soup kitchen from the group's vegetable garden. She stretches her $10,000 in annual funding to train staff to look after bedridden AIDS victims, feed and clothe orphans, and do stigma-busting work at schools and taxi ranks.
Hundreds of similar small grass-roots projects are being funded by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, alongside higher-profile charities and big state clinics.
Bush launched the $15 billion plan in 2003 to expand prevention, treatment and support programs in 15 hard-hit countries, 12 of them African, which account for more than half the world's estimated 33 million AIDS infections. The initiative tied in with a World Health Organization campaign to put 3 million people on AIDS drugs by 2005 — a goal it says was reached in 2007.
Congress last year passed legislation more than tripling the budget to $48 billion over the next five years, with Republicans and Democrats alike hailing the program as a remarkable success.
But the task remains enormous. More than 1.5 million Africans died in 2007 (the U.S. death toll is under 15,000), fewer than one-third had access to treatment, and new infections continued to outstrip those receiving life-prolonging drugs.
In most African countries, life expectancy has dropped dramatically, and only a few, like Botswana, have started to turn the corner again.
And with no end in sight to the global financial crisis, there are fears about whether all the funding approved by Congress will be delivered.
There continue to be detractors who say the U.S. administration should have channeled the money through the U.N.; that it has placed too much emphasis on faith-based groups and abstinence; that it has trampled on women's health by shunning anything associated with abortions; that it has concentrated on AIDS treatment at the expense of prevention; and that it has diverted attention away from bigger killers like pneumonia and diarrhea.
Helen Epstein, an AIDS expert who has consulted for the U.N. and the World Bank, says both the U.N. and PEPFAR have failed disastrously on prevention by preaching abstinence until marriage and failing to recognize that in some African cultures it is the norm to have several simultaneous long-term relationships. Continue >>
David Ben-Ariel »
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