Trade Unions Declare All-Out Anti-AIDS War

By Judith Achieng’

NAIROBI, Oct 20 (IPS) - The African trade union movement has launched a 6.3 million US dollar campaign to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the continent.

The five-year "mother of all campaigns" will not just be fighting for the quality of life for workers, but also their right to life, through awareness and cheaper AIDS drugs.

"We intend to encourage African governments to show concern and political will to fight the HIV/AIDS scourge," Andrew Kailembo, who heads the African chapter of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), told a conference here this week.

The project will initially be carried out in nine pilot countries, including Kenya, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Swaziland, Uganda, Ivory Coast, South Africa and Namibia, all among the most hit by the scourge.

Africa has 24.5 million out of the 34.3 million AIDS sufferers globally.

For a continent largely viewed to be lagging behind in social and economic development, Africans remain the most vulnerable group accounting for over four-fifths of the world’s AIDS deaths and 95 percent of the children orphaned by the epidemic.

Even more alarming, is the rate at which HIV, the virus that causes AIDS spreads, with some of the hardest hit countries registering infection rates as high as 30 percent of their adult population.

In Botswana, for example, one out of three adults are HIV positive according to official figures and at least half of the southern African country’s population of 1.6 million people is already infected with the virus.

South Africa has about four million AIDS sufferers.

The conference heard that, most African countries are yet to prioritise HIV/AIDS in their development plans, despite the bleak picture for lack of funds.

The question of tackling the spread of AIDS also remains a matter debate for majority who still have to decide to buy a condom or bread.

"This is something the African governments will have to deal with in both human and financial terms," ICFTU president, Fackson Shamenda, said here.

"HIV/AIDS not only is an epidemic that discriminates against the poor, but also thrives on ignorance, its main asset. We have no alternative. Whatever resources we have, these resources can only be enjoyed if people are alive," he said.

The giant trade union movement and its affiliates in the continent, during the five-year campaign, will be lobbying African governments to prioritise HIV/AIDS among the top factors affecting development.

The campaign also seeks to lobby pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost of AIDS treatment drugs, currently beyond the reach of majority of African consumers.

In most African countries, a patient needs up to US dollars 42,000 a year, to acquire the essential drugs to stay alive, an unrealistic amount for a continent where nearly 50 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day.

In Kenya, people with AIDS in hospitals are being told to take their loved ones home to die because the treatments for AIDS related complications are too expensive.

The same drugs have been manufactured in countries like Thailand and South Africa without the protection of patents, costing less than a dollar for a daily dose.

The two countries have, however, come under pressure from the United States government to stop the compulsory licensing of drugs, in an effort to maintain the monopoly of multinational pharmaceutical companies on production and prices of the drugs.

"The greatest scandal of our time is that drug companies are holding dying people at ransom," Bill Jordan, ICFTU’s secretary general said here.

"If there is anyone as bad as they are, it is the government leaders who defend the right by these companies to do so through punitive intellectual property rights regulations," he told delegates.

"There is no right greater than the right to live."

The meeting was a follow up to the Pan-African Conference on Involving Workers in the Fight against HIV/AIDS in the Workplace, which took place Sept 27-29 in the Botswana capital of Gaborone.

The conference drew up a trade union declaration, which among other things, calls for the direct involvement of shop stewards and other union representatives in the fight against HIV/AIDS at the workplace level.

"We declared that in as much as the numbers are frightening, we now need to go beyond the statistics and emotions. We need fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic and we need to fight it now," Kailembo told 30 participants in the meeting.

The meeting drew participants from the trade union movement, and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) of the United Nations, which has recently launched a global programme for HIV/AIDS, where it is pushing for international equality and debt cancellation for developing countries.

"There should be no excuse with respect to fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It is a fight against life and against equity," said Mohammed Mwamadzingo, of the ILO office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (END/IPS/ja/sm/00)