Mbeki's African National Congress (ANC) government started distributing free anti-AIDS drugs at a handful of state hospitals last week, but opposition parties were quick to point out that the long-overdue move was curiously close to the April 14 elections.

"For ten years, the ANC has had the power to create jobs, to fight crime and to treat HIV and AIDS. But in all that time, it failed to deliver," main opposition leader Tony Leon said.

The cabinet approved a national treatment plan last November but has since failed to keep its promise to provide free anti-retrovirals to more than 50,000 people by the end of March.

"Across the nation, the ANC has broken its promises on AIDS," said Leon, leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) whose platform with the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party calls for more action to combat AIDS.

AIDS ranks alongside crime, poverty and unemployment as a hot election issue but opposition parties have not come up with any fresh ideas on fighting the pandemic other than providing free anti-retrovirals.

South Africa has one of the highest AIDS rates in the world with an estimated 5.3 million people, or one in nine South Africans, living with HIV or AIDS.

The AIDS lobby group, Treatment Action Campaign, says some 600 people die of AIDS in South Africa every day, making it the country's biggest killer.

Not surprising then, that the government's failure to mount a quick response to AIDS has become a burning issue in the run-up to the elections which coincide with the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid.

Just four years ago, Mbeki infamously questioned whether there was a link between HIV and AIDS and labelled anti-retrovirals "dangerous" after which he clammed up.

While launching his party's election campaign in January, Mbeki did not mention AIDS and only made a fleeting reference to the disease during a state of the nation address to parliament in February.

His health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, continues to advocate a diet of garlic, olive oil, beetroot and spinach to boost the immune system and beat

Until late last year, the government doggedly refused to bow to appeals for action and even opposed several court rulings ordering it to provide free drugs.

Cabinet finally bowed to public pressure in November when it approved a plan to provide free AIDS drugs, which, once implemented, would be the most comprehensive in Africa.

Weeks later, former South African president Nelson Mandela put his weight behind the war on AIDS in South Africa, saying it posed a greater threat than apartheid.

"Today we find ourselves faced with an even greater threat in the form of HIV and AIDS which threatens our future on a scale never seen before. We are called to fight now on an even greater scale than which we fought apartheid," Mandela said.

But AIDS activists, political parties and health care workers believe the government response is still too slow.

The head of a sick children's unit at an AIDS orphanage in Johannesburg, Stella Dubazana, told AFP that 160 children had died of AIDS at the Cotlands Baby Sanctuary for abused, abandoned and HIV-positive kids since 2002.

"Things will start getting easier for us now that the state is giving drugs," said Dubazana. "But we would not have lost so many children if the government had acted faster."

One of Mbeki's fiercest critics is Patricia de Lille, whose Independent Democrats have seized on AIDS as a campaign plank. She went for a public AIDS test on Monday and urged Mbeki to do the same.

"The reason I am taking the test is because we are 10 years behind from the rest of the world in terms of fighting the AIDS pandemic and are still in denial," De Lille said.

Mbeki's spokesman Bheki Khumalo, however, rejected her appeal to the president as "silly shenanigans... meant for nothing other than attracting votes."

TERRA.WIRE