critics claimed that he continued to influence – and impede – HIV/AIDS policy, a charge which Mbeki denied. AIDS activist Zackie Achmat said in 2002 that "Mbeki epitomizes leadership in denial and his stand has fuelled government inaction." Gevisser writes that in 2007 Mbeki continued to defend his position on HIV/AIDS, and directed Gevisser to a controversial and anonymous ANC discussion document titled Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot & Mouth and Statistics: HIV/Aids and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African. The Gevisser biography also says that, while Mbeki never explicitly denied the link between HIV and AIDS, he is a "profound sceptic" – as Mbeki himself wrote in 2016, in a newsletter cautioning "great care and caution" in the use of antiretrovirals, he had not denied that HIV caused AIDS but that "a virus [could] cause a syndrome." He is generally referred to as an HIV/AIDS "dissident" rather than an outright denialist, although Nattrass questions the value of that distinction. FIFA World Cup bid As president, Mbeki spearheaded South Africa's successful bid to host the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Commentators, and Mbeki himself, frequently linked the bid to his vision for an African renaissance. In 2015, amid an American investigation into corruption at FIFA, soccer administrator Chuck Blazer testified that, between 2004 and 2011, he and other FIFA executives had received bribes in connection with South Africa's bid. Mbeki denied any knowledge of the bribes. Electricity crisis In late 2007, Mbeki's government announced that the public power utility, Eskom, would introduce electricity rationing or rolling blackouts, commonly known in South Africa as loadshedding. In subsequent months, Mbeki publicly apologised, acknowledging that the government had failed to heed Eskom's warnings, offered regularly for several consecutive years, that infrastructure investments were required to avoid energy shortages – in his words, "Eskom was right and government was wrong." However, some analysts suggested that insufficient investment was not the hindrance to electricity supply, and that other policy decisions by government and at Eskom, including the implementation of black economic empowerment criteria in coal procurement contracts, had contributed to the crisis. In his last State of the Nation address in February 2008, Mbeki repeated the apology and devoted nearly three pages of his speech to government's plans for addressing the energy crisis. 2008 xenophobic attacks In May 2008, a series of riots took place in a number of South African townships, mainly