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South Africa needed someone with independence and imagination to lead its fight against HIV/Aids, one of the country's foremost experts on the disease Prof Jerry Coovadia said on Sunday. "We really need to invest in a leadership on this programme which is of the order of a general leading a war of enormous magnitude," he said on the SABC programme Newsmaker. "We need somebody who has the autonomy, independence, imagination and intelligence to lead that programme." Coovadia, a member of President Thabo Mbeki's Aids panel and a Durban academic, was convenor of last year's World Aids conference in the city. His call followed former president Nelson Mandela's statement on Saturday that countries that had succeeded in bringing down the levels of Aids were those where the president took the lead. However, Mandela denied that he was criticising Mbeki -- who he said was too busy with international affairs to concentrate on South Africa's problems. Coovadia said the main impact of the current debate around the use of the anti-retroviral Nevirapine was that it was side-tracking the country from the key issues about addressing the Aids epidemic. The lobby group Treatment Action Campaign has taken the government to court in a ...