Powell Takes On Continent’s Woes in Visit to South Africa

In a day of profound human trauma and political drama, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Friday tackled the array of challenges shaping the future of this troubled continent--and was cheered and jeered for his efforts.

In South Africa, the country with the largest number of people with AIDS and the deadliest projected toll from the disease, he came face to face with the pandemic during emotional encounters with its victims.

Among them was Florence Ngobeni, whose child and partner have died since she was found to have HIV. Like many here, she is increasingly turning to the outside world for help.

“My story is not that important. I don’t look like I have HIV. A lot of people can’t stand up and say anything, as they have no food and nothing to sustain them,” Ngobeni told Powell during the secretary’s visit to the Village of Hope, a U.S.-funded AIDS facility in this town just outside Johannesburg.

“Governments always let us down, but we know you have promised and always deliver. I know by coming here you’ve come to bring us the light, even though you’ve brought nothing,” she added.

Powell, whose four-nation African swing is heavily focused on AIDS and its impact in reconfiguring the continent, responded by calling on African leaders to do more publicly to prevent the continent from losing decades of political and economic progress.

“So much progress across this continent . . . all can be undone by the unchecked plague of HIV/AIDS,” he warned. “Leaders can send lifesaving messages about people taking responsibility for their own behavior and about ending the stigmatization of the afflicted.”

Among the slowest to heed that message has been South African President Thabo Mbeki, who until recently questioned whether HIV triggers acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Many South Africans still aren’t satisfied with their officials. “Our people are dying,” Prudence Mabele, a frail young woman who was found to have the human immunodeficiency virus a decade ago at age 19, told Powell. “Our government is not supportive enough. The time is way past to just stick to prevention.”

She added: “You are an African. And as an African, you will see to it that African issues are taken into consideration.”

“We will do everything we can,” Powell later told the HIV and AIDS patients, who ranged from a 6-year-old abandoned after her mother died to a 49-year-old woman who was infected during a bone marrow procedure performed to combat cancer.

With an estimated 4.7 million of South Africa’s 45 million people HIV-positive and 1,700 cases added daily, the disease is a crisis requiring a holistic approach.

“It is an economic crisis, a social crisis, a crisis for democracy, a threat to stability, a threat to the very future of Africa,” Powell said.

Because the rate of HIV infection is now almost 25% among the sexually active, AIDS deaths in South Africa are expected to reach 6 million during the next decade and average life expectancy is expected to fall to 40 years from 60 years, according to the State Department.

In a speech to South African youth, Powell later took on the continent’s political woes, particularly the holdouts against democratic reforms, and virtually called on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to surrender office.

“After more than 20 years in office, Mugabe seems determined to remain in power,” Powell told students and faculty at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It should be up to Zimbabwe’s voters to select their leader in a free election, he said, “and they should be given one so that they can make their choice as to how they will be governed in the future.”

Reflecting the Bush administration’s focus on self-help, Powell said the United States will “be a friend to all Africans who seek peace. But we cannot make peace among Africans. Africans themselves must bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for bringing stability to the continent.”

The solution to poverty is to open up politically and economically, because “money is a coward,” he advised a country where 70% of men in poor areas such as Soweto are unemployed, 60% of those employed are outside the formal sector and 500,000 have been laid off in the last two years.

“Capital will run from those countries which are closed, which are corrupt, which do not have open systems, which do not believe in the rule of law, which are callous or which are caught up in conflict,” he warned.

But Powell’s reception was not warm on campus, where he received the stiffest opposition to any speech since he took office. Demonstrators with the South African Student Congress handed out leaflets noting that Powell had worked for the Reagan administration, which “undermined resistance” to apartheid and backed a dictatorship in Congo, formerly Zaire. Powell, who began his Africa tour in Mali, will travel to Kenya today and to Uganda on Sunday.