Over the past several months a number of senior ANC figures have taken to complaining that our constitutional system is an impediment to transformation. This has attracted the retort - from former Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson and others - that this is nonsense as transformation is, in fact, a constitutional imperative. This debate seems to me to be somewhat misdirected. If there is a serious minded charge to be made against the Constitution it is that it allowed for too much "transformation" not too little.
In particular the Constitution's defences against the ANC's centralisation of power in the late 1990s were weak and ineffective. Indeed, the ANC's efforts to destroy the checks and balances integral to liberal democracy - all in the name of transformation - have been so successful that there has yet to be a proper accounting for the abuses that occurred during that period.
One of these is obviously the Arms Deal, though it is now the subject of a slow moving judicial inquiry. The other is the ANC's involvement in the development of the putative AIDS cure, Virodene, between 1997 and 2002. The Virodene story was extensively documented on Politicsweb in 2007 but two recent books provide important confirmatory evidence of the extent of the involvement of the ANC and Thabo Mbeki in the whole affair.
Virodene was (illegally) tested on HIV/AIDS patients in late 1996 and the miraculous results presented to cabinet by then Deputy President Mbeki in February 1997. In his memoir Politics in my Blood the late Kader Asmal describes how cabinet were bowled over by the presentation. He writes: "Virodene's champion was Mbeki himself. He couldn't wait to prove Africa's potential in the field of science and technology." He comments:
"It made perfect sense that the solution to Africa's problems would come from Africa. There was a logic, even an inevitability , about it. It was preordained. Or was it? We never, ever, in my ten years in Cabinet, agreed there and then to write a cheque for millions of rands for any project. We did then, that day, and we wrote it out for snake oil. I was shocked. Not even Manuel could resist, as Mbeki promised to find the funds other than from Treasury. Later, at the usual post-Cabinet press conference, Mbeki said the government would ‘look favourably' on the researchers' request for R3.7 million to continue their studies. In fact, the deal was already done and for considerably more than R3.7 million. My recollection is that it could even have been four times as much. It was unheard of to make such an award, for anything at a Cabinet meeting."
This funding fell through after the Medicines Control Council intervened to block testing of Virodene on human subjects. The ANC thus needed to urgently come up with an alternative source of funding if the promise of this drug was to be realised. Incidentally, any serious inquiry into the Arms Deal would need to examine the possible links between the two scandals as there is significant chronological overlap between them.