All Power to the People! TAC turns 25!
This year TAC is 25. It’s been a quarter of a century of building an organisation from the ground up to what it is today. Today TAC remains integral to the fight for health rights for all, uniting with other activists and organisations in the pursuit of building a just society.
In celebrating our anniversary, first we remember the many family members, comrades, and friends we have lost along the way. People who died without hope. For many, treatment simply came too late. Never again can people be allowed to die in need of HIV treatment and other health services.
At this moment we must count our victories and the positive impact they have had on people’s lives. Each victory gives us strength and sustains us as we fight on in courage and purpose.
Our milestones have been many, but we look back at where it all started. It was in 1998 when 10 people staged a protest on the steps of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. They were calling out government’s silence and inaction on the AIDS epidemic raging at the time. People were dying in numbers from AIDS — we knew this from pages and pages of obituaries in newspapers, from traffic jams at cemeteries on Saturdays, and because we were watching people in our communities dying. From this protest on 10 December 1998, the Treatment Action Campaign was born.
The first chapter of TAC was the fight for treatment. The fight against the denialist government, forcing them to take responsibility and do whatever they had to, to get HIV treatment to the people who needed it — and the fight against the unconscionably high price of HIV medicines being sold by greedy pharma companies, leaving millions on death row.
From the very beginning we knew our strength was in empowering each other, taking treatment literacy door to door, from person to person. It was also the way to fight stigma. With every new person we reached and with every new person who chose to put on an “HIV positive” t-shirt we had another win for people living with HIV. By standing together we made ourselves seen and heard.
Over the years we have built hundreds of branches across the country, we have mobilised thousands to march in the streets, we have slept outside our politicians’ offices, we have taken to the courts, we have spoken relentlessly in the media, we have held sit-ins and vigils, and we have faced tear gas, rubber bullets, intimidation, and arrest. We put our bodies in the fight because we have always known that it is about our rights, our health, our lives.
One of the first successes was getting the government to approve and make available nevirapine to pregnant women with HIV, in order to prevent mother to child transmission. The push for ARVs for all people living with HIV also ran parallel and in 2004 this finally became a reality. It meant lives were saved. Today, in large part due to the activism of TAC and our accomplices, we have the world’s largest HIV programme. This success is something to be celebrated.
That said, today the struggle is not over. Too many people are still dying from AIDS and TB. We have all the tools we need to halt these crises, but they continue when people are pushed out of care or avoid it in the first place because of conditions in the health system and the ways we are treated. The question is not so much what to do, but how to get it done given the state of our healthcare systems.
As TAC we are clear: our struggle is now in a new chapter, a chapter where our fundamental fight is against dysfunction, negligence, and corruption in our public healthcare system.
For the last decade, as TAC we have been pushing for accountability in our clinics and hospitals. Hundreds of our branches spread across the country adopted a clinic — where our members, all users of the public healthcare system, started monitoring and advocating for change locally. The more we monitored, the more we saw the near collapse of our public healthcare system.
We rolled out an annual national TB infection control survey after it became clear that TB infection control measures were grossly deficient in many facilities — turning many clinic waiting areas into likely transmission areas.
We fought the collapse of provincial healthcare systems: fact-finding in clinics and hospitals, documenting stockouts, marching, organising commissions of inquiry, and fighting for the rights of persecuted community healthcare workers.
In order to more consistently gather evidence on the state of our clinics — in 2019 TAC led the development of the world’s most extensive community-led monitoring system known as “Ritshidze”. Together with other organisations of people living with HIV, we now systematically collect data at more than 400 local clinics every three months that are analysed, and then used to generate solutions that are put to duty bearers for action.
We count among our victories the progress we have made in advocating for the health rights of people who use drugs, sex workers, and people from the LGBTQIA+ community — shifting their health needs from the periphery to be rightfully at the centre of our community-led monitoring and advocacy.
Winning justice for the former gold miners who developed silicosis and/or tuberculosis because of the neglect and greed of the mining companies are also among our victories — and for a cabinet approved plan to Fix our Patent Laws, the first step needed in ensuring South Africa has better access to affordable medicines, which will strike a blow against the profiteering of big pharma.
Our continued pressure for TB to be declared a public health emergency has seen the release of a TB recovery plan and for TB be elevated in priority in government, a dire necessity given the tens of thousands of lives lost to TB each year.
As we look to the next few years TAC will also focus on a greater push to realise universal health coverage in South Africa. The promise of equal quality healthcare for all — including migrants, asylum seekers, and stateless people — cannot be a pipe dream that we keep circling around and never reaching.
We will continue to find new ways to work with collaborators, even our opponents, if it’s to improve the lives or our people, but we will also never compromise on our independence or our right to take a different viewpoint. And we will always take to the streets and march if that is what is needed. Our focus will also be on building our strengths internally, focusing strongly on building up from our branches and districts.
TAC at 25 remains an organisation for the people. We cannot and will not rest until everyone in South Africa has the chance for a better life.
Read our full report to mark our 25th anniversary here: https://www.tac.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/TAC@25-power2people-web.pdf
See our event programme here: https://www.tac.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/TAC@25-PROGRAMME.pdf
