The SANAC Plenary Meeting held in April was the last to be chaired by then-Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe. While many successes were celebrated at the meeting, there still remain many challenges in South Africa’s HIV and TB response.
The SANAC Plenary Meeting held in Modimolle in Limpopo on 15 April 2014 was special because it was a celebration of the tremendous progress made by the current administration over the last five years. The meeting listened to the Minister of Health, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, as he relived the changes of the last five years describing the gains made in the roll out of antiretroviral treatment to more than 2.4 million South Africans and the reduction of HIV transmission in pregnancy to 2.7%, as reported by the Medical Research Council in 2012. These gains have been corroborated by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Household Survey results (see page 6 for more on this), and by the increases in life expectancy and the declines in infant and child mortality.
This Plenary Meeting was the last one to be chaired by the former Deputy President, Kgalema Motlanthe, who has decided to bow out of parliamentary politics at the end of this term. Steve Letsike, representing civil society, and Brian Brink, representing the private sector, expressed their appreciation to the Deputy President for bringing stability to SANAC after its tumultuous years of the previous administration. SANAC is now stable, credible and firmly established in the driving seat of the response to AIDS, TB and STIs. A small tribute in the form of a five minute video reminded participants of the multiple roles that the Deputy President played in building SANAC and its legal body, the SANAC Trust, into what is has become today.
However, the Minister of Health did highlight some challenges that are being faced in South Africa’s HIV response. He warned that in a recent World Health Organisation (WHO) review, it shows that the number of patients who drop out of the antiretroviral therapy (ART) programme after 12 months is high and that more attention must be paid to the quality of the health care provided. The main weakness of the HIV response in South Africa has been our failure to reduce HIV incidence. The rate of new HIV infections is too high and much more needs to be done to address behaviour change, promoting condom use, reducing multiple sexual partners and reducing the number of age-disparate sexual encounters in which older men with higher risk of HIV have a high probability of infecting younger women.
The Minister proposed that SANAC should embark on a major national mass communication and behaviour change programme. He called on SANAC to support the Department of Health in demand creation and social mobilisation to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV to less than 1% and to breathe new life into the HIV Counselling and Testing (HCT) and Medical Male Circumcision (MMC) campaigns that were re-launched by former Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe on World AIDS Day 2013. The Minister said that SANAC should lead the prevention fight and that both government and civil society should rally behind the new prevention efforts. In an interesting twist to his presentation, the Minister said that community mobilisation and the national prevention effort will not succeed without the critical role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations. He called for a two-day summit to look at the declining trends in NGO funding.
The SANAC Plenary Meeting held in Modimolle was a topquality event for a number of other reasons too. Although not on the agenda there was a palpable level of progress in the standard of the logistics and organisation. Good organisation resulting in good attendance, a carefully planned agenda and rich discussions are a reflection of the overall maturation of the new governance structures within SANAC. The richness of the discussion was a sign that many issues had been discussed by the preceding Civil Society Forum and Programme Review Committee meetings in the run up to the Plenary. These meetings, in turn, were informed by more technical discussions in the Technical Task Teams held over the last few months. There have been almost 15 technical task team (TTT) meetings and the intellectual content in these TTTs is making its way into the Programme Review Committee and Plenary Meetings.
To watch the special tribute to former Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe for his role as Chairperson of SANAC, go to http://www.sanac.org.za/news/videos/item/140-celebrating-ourfive- year-journey