AIDS, Botswana, and More Bush Administration Lies
empirenotes.org
Anyone who occasionally opens a newspaper knows that Iraq, although the most consistent subject of administration lies, is far from the only one. In fact, it's difficult to find a topic on which this administration won't lie. Still, the mendacity uncovered by Craig Timberg in his front-page Washington Post article, Botswana's Gains Against AIDS Put U.S. Claims to Test, is particularly shocking.
Of course, Bush's much-vaunted $15 billion global AIDS funding initiative has been decried by activist organizations as a scam from the beginning. Back in January, I wrote a short assessment of its progress to date. It's a while since anyone should have been confused about this issue.
Even so, Timberg's story is amazing. Back around the time of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bush anti-AIDS officials put out press releases hyping their progress, in which they said, among other things, that U.S. aid was responsible for anti-retroviral treatment of 32,839 patients in Botswana.
Now, even if this number was true, it would have shown the hollow sham that is the "international" effort to fight AIDS. Even though Botswana has a very small population (about 1.6 million), 32,000 is only a tiny fraction of its AIDS sufferers.
However, says Segolame Ramotlhwa, operations manager of Botswana's treatment program, the U.S. figures are "a gross misrepresentation of the facts." His boss, the deputy permanent secretary for health services, more diplomatically suggested that the figures were a "mistake."
To those familiar with Bush's postmodern style of government, the true number of patients who owe their care to U.S. aid will come as no surprise: zero.
In fact, says Timberg, "The total outlay of U.S. government funds for 'treatment' in Botswana last year was $2.5 million, about one-twentieth of the amount paid by the Botswana government. And even that money was delayed by many months."
Shortly after Bush's stirring announcement of the U.S. initiative in the 2003 State of the Union address, his administration decided that the best way would be to work through existing governments and their programs, rather than building separate clinics, separately hiring doctors, etc. The next step, logically, was to work through existing programs and then forget to actually fund them.
The crowning step is, once you have established negligible involvement in existing programs, to claim credit for all patients treated under their programs.
That is precisely what they have done. Indeed, since then Botswana has submitted the figure 41,444 to the U.S. government. That is the total number of people in Botwana receiving anti-retroviral treatment (with under 5% of those funds coming from the United States). The result? Now, the administration is claiming credit for treatment of 41,444 Botswanans.
Incidentally, the treatment numbers for Botswana are far better than they are for many other nations in Africa, for India and South Asia, and other places, because Botswana is comparatively wealthy. Diamond exports give it a per capita GDP in dollars of over 3500 (2003 World Bank figures), often translated into a PPP (purchasing power parity) in the high 8000's. |
