Minister Motsoaledi relaunches SA TB Caucus, reaffirms commitment to ending the disease

Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi announced a relaunch of the South African Tuberculosis (TB) Caucus on Tuesday, 28 October, as a platform for members of Parliament and provincial legislatures to “champion” the response to the disease in the country.

Motsoaledi described the caucus as a bridge between political leadership, the health sector and communities. 

“Our success as a country will be gauged by reduced mortality, increased treatment success and restored dignity for every South African living with or affected by TB,” he said.

The SA TB Caucus was originally launched in 2018, following the establishment of the Global TB Caucus – a worldwide network of parliamentarians – in 2014. Motsoaledi co-chaired the global group at the time it was created.

However, the minister said the SA TB Caucus had “silently disappeared” in the intervening years.

“Today, we are reforming it and asking members of Parliament, this time around, please don’t let it disappear,” he said.

Tools to fight TB

Last week, the Department of Health, in partnership with the National Health Laboratory Service and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, launched a public-facing dashboard providing real-time TB testing data from across the country. The web-based platform is a tool for tracking the country’s progress towards the End TB Campaign’s goal of testing five million people each year.

The dashboard shows that 1.76 million people have been tested since April 2025, which represents 60.7% of the 2.9 million testing target to date. Of those tested, about 89,000 were found to have TB.

Motsoaledi noted that the dashboard would help the caucus to track TB testing across age groups, genders and regions.

“It’s very difficult for many people to accept the fact… that TB is the biggest killer among all the infectious diseases. We’re not scared of it like we’re scared of all the other pandemics… and I once mentioned that the reason is that TB is not a drama queen. It doesn’t cause the presidents of the world to close borders. It doesn’t cause presidents to address nations,” he said.

“We have launched an anti-TB campaign where we must test five million people for tuberculosis annually. Test them and put them on treatment every year. This is a mammoth task.”

Call to action

Acting chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Health Tembalam Xego called the relaunch of the SA TB Caucus a “call to action”, adding that the responsibility for the fight against the disease couldn’t rest on the Health Department alone, but needed to involve every division of government, other sectors of society and communities. She encouraged people to work together across political and provincial lines.

Russell Rensburg, director of the Rural Health Advocacy Project, noted that “to end TB, we have to find TB”, adding that the new TB dashboard would allow state actors to track whether they were testing for the disease in the correct places.

According to the Department of Health, TB has been the leading cause of death in South Africa for several years and continues to pose a significant public health threat, claiming about 56,000 lives a year.

“Nothing can be more debilitating than living with a disease or dying from a disease that’s both treatable and curable,” said Rensburg.

The SA TB Caucus, as a tool for political accountability in the fight against the disease, had the potential to unite officials across party lines to progressively expand the right to healthcare, he noted.

The relaunch of the caucus comes before Motsoaledi’s statement before the National Assembly on Tuesday afternoon, which will be centred on collaborative efforts to fight the disease. DM