EFF statement on Presidency and NDOH silence on CGE report and forced sterilization of HIV positive women
1 August 2020
The Economic Freedom Fighters renders immense disdain towards the Presidency and the National Department of Health in how it has responded in complete silence to the Commission for Gender Equality report and recommendations regarding the brutal sterilisation of HIV positive women dating from as far back as 1997 in known cases.
For over a decade, the government of the ANC has been aware of the treacherous eugenics brutality waged against Black women with HIV that saw the unethical and abusive coercion and force for them to be sterilised against their own will and with discriminatory emphasis. The Commission for Gender Equity compiled a report and distinct recommendations for the National Department of Health aimed at reconciling efforts of justice and ensuring that this never happens again.
Four months post the release of the report, the National Department of Health and the Presidency for Ministry of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities have yet to make strides in rectifying the obtrusive and destructive abuse Black women who are HIV positive have faced at the hands of the undoubtedly racist and sexist health system of South Africa.
The ANC government under the leadership of President Cyril Ramaphosa and Minister Zweli Mkhize has played witness and enabler to this abuse and continues to do so in their silence and their insistence to pretend this catastrophic event has never happened. The lives of numerous Black women were altered in the most inhumane way. This traced and laced in the tendencies of white supremacist behaviour to strip away the dignity, bodily autonomy, the right to voluntary motherhood, and essentially, rights to health and dignity located in the era of slavery.
The Economic Freedom Fighters calls for an immediate response and intervention by the National Department of Health and the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities. The recommendations entailed in the report compiled by the CGE must with immediate effect be attended to for the purposes of justice and to thwart future attempts of this brutality that will continue to happen if attempts to halt the violence do not happen.
HIV positive women, more especially Black women, continue to face immeasurable isolation, discrimination and abuse. It is unacceptable that this form of Gender-Based Violence against HIV positive women happens with no consequences in the least for the perpetrators of the violence and the system that protects this violence.
Issued by Vuyani Pambo, National Spokesperson, EFF, 1 August 2020
