SOUTH AFRICA:South African president Thabo Mbeki has enraged HIV treatment activists and has sparked a fresh political rift in government circles by sacking an outspoken junior minister who had championed the Aids issue.
Deputy minister for health Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge was relieved of her duties, purportedly for travelling to an Aids conference in Spain in June without receiving permission from the presidency.
However, critics of the decision say the junior minister - one of South Africa's most respected woman politicians - is being victimised for publicly questioning the government's much-maligned stance on HIV/Aids.
Earlier this year, Ms Madlala-Routledge criticised health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang for advocating natural remedies - including a farcical cocktail of garlic, beetroot and African potato - to treat Aids.
Calling for an end to the denial of Aids in South Africa, Ms Madlala-Routledge suggested senior politicians should set an example by going for HIV tests.
She also clashed with the health minister by describing as a "national crisis" the poor conditions at a hospital in East London, which had recently seen a spike in infant mortalities.
Mr Mbeki publicly sided with Ms Tshabalala-Msimang in the hospital affair, saying the deaths had been hyped up in the media.
Left-leaning members of South Africa's governing tripartite alliance, which had previously publicly praised Ms Madlala-Routledge's efforts, expressed outrage at the sacking yesterday.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions said the dismissal would deepen "a culture of sycophancy" in government, while the South African Communist Party (SACP) cited a lack of consultation.
Ms Madlala-Routledge, who played a key part in framing a new widely acclaimed national Aids strategy earlier this year, was last month voted on to the central committee of the SACP.
The party has a significant overlapping membership with the ruling African National Congress, which is the dominant force in the tripartite alliance.
The Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa's leading HIV/ Aids lobby group, described the dismissal as "a dreadful error of judgment that will harm public healthcare and especially the response to the HIV epidemic".
The group described as "trivial" Ms Madlala-Routledge's alleged offence of travelling to an Aids conference with her son and a consultant at a cost of 160,000 Rand (€16,000), without Mr Mbeki's permission.
The matter had been leaked to the media in a "distorted manner" in order to discredit the deputy minister, the campaign added.
Suspicions of a witch-hunt have been fuelled by the fact that other ministers have committed similar breaches of protocol without punishment.
Critics of the sacking also point to the lack of disciplinary action taken against deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, a close ally of Mr Mbeki, who has been implicated in two "gravy plane" incidents.
Independent Democrats president Patricia De Lille said the sacking, which coincided with national women's day yesterday, was "an insult to every single South African woman who has the courage to stand up for the truth".
The Democratic Alliance accused Mr Mbeki of being a "bully", while the Inkatha Freedom Party said the dismissal suggested obedience in government was more important than effectiveness.
Mr Mbeki has been widely accused of adopting a denialist stance on HIV. In a newspaper interview in 2003 he said he was personally unaware of anyone who had died of Aids. South Africa has an estimated 5.4 million people living with HIV, the biggest such total anywhere in the world after India, which has a much larger population.
Mr Mbeki declined to comment on the sacking yesterday while addressing a women's day event in Northern Cape. Presidential spokesman Mukoni Ratshitanga said Mr Mbeki did not have to provide reasons for the dismissal.