Pretoria – Gauteng Health officials should take immediate steps to plug the financial leaks, including massive corruption and wide-scale looting of public resources as unearthed at Tembisa Hospital.
Speaking to television channel Newzroom Afrika, Wits University’s Professor Alex Van Den Heever said the provincial health authorities are reluctant to act, and the suspension of Gauteng health department CFO Lerato Madyo and Tembisa Hospital CEO Mthunzi over the R850 million scandal were too late.
“I do not think that really amounts to serious action. It has taken 12 months to suspend someone who is obviously responsible and accountable for a serious, egregious financial misconduct within that facility – the CEO who was responsible for signing off what was obviously problematic transactions. In my assessment of it, it looked fabricated. I do not think any of that stuff was delivered to that facility,” he said.
“The concern is that the province does nothing. It sits back on its hands and likely, after the issue is raised in public, suspends the officials. This type of thing has been done before. They just hope we will forget about it. It is also a shame now, with the latest report from News24, that key players within the ANC were the key people doing business with Tembisa Hospital through different companies.”
Van Den Heever said when service becomes inadequate for communities, immigrants are conveniently blamed.
“When this province pleads poverty, that it doesn’t have money and resources to run a proper health system, and that it is immigrants that are causing the problems, we have to call that out as an absolute lie. We are seeing here that there is no proper supervision of finances in the province, and it is severely harming the public. It is just unconscionable,” he said.
Ongoing News24 investigations have revealed that Tembisa Hospital paid R9 600 for a plastic household bucket – in a series of “dirty payments totalling nearly R55 million that were channelled to a network of companies run by one family”.
The investigations centre around the brutal murder of Gauteng Health senior finance official and whistle-blower Babita Deokaran, who had flagged more than R800 million in possibly fraudulent payments from the Gauteng-based health institution just weeks before her cold-blooded murder.
The Tembisa Hospital has also been in the headlines after it emerged that it had also spent R498 000 on skinny jeans last year. The now suspended hospital CEO Ashley Mthunzi said the skinny jeans were purchased erroneously after a wrong product code was entered.
Last week, following weeks of anti-immigrant protests in Pretoria, Health Minister Dr Joe Phaahla said the influx of foreign nationals using SA hospitals has added to the burden on the country’s health system.
However, Phaahla said the public healthcare system was already suffering from low staff numbers, inadequate budgetary allocations, maladministration and wide-scale corruption.
“We are saying our Constitution is very clear in terms of the mandate of the state to provide health services to people who are in our country.
“We do accept that our services are under pressure and that if this demand for services (by) our neighbours keeps on increasing, it will reach a stage where it is not sustainable.”
Phaahla spoke to journalists at the Kalafong Provincial Tertiary Hospital in Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria.
“We believe that it is not up to ordinary citizens to think that they can deal with that; to help the state. No. That is not the correct approach.”
He said there were “many other challenges” bedevilling the health institutions across South Africa.
“There are many other challenges we must deal with to improve the quality of service. We acknowledge that even without the pressure of neighbours, we do have challenges in terms of allocation of funds.
“There has been a reduction… we are not able to provide enough staff; they were telling me here about the staff shortages. We are discussing with our colleagues in the National Treasury to look at further improvement in the staffing,” he said.
IOL