OPINION: Official statistics and audit reports suggest that lack of consequence management, irregular expenditure and shocking vacancy rates is what is ’killing’ hospitals and health care, not immigrants, writes Rabbie Serumula.
By Rabbie Serumula
IT IS ALMOST eight years since my sick aunt died after she slept on a cold hospital floor for three days, waiting for a bed at an overcrowded public hospital.
It still brings tears to my eyes how her lifeline, a contaminated drip attached to her skin and the fabric of her humanity, seemed to be untangled at the seams.
She was attached to her detachment from the living, even though she still had a pulse; faint as it was, a pulse is a pulse and it slowly counted the footsteps of nurses passing by.
It counted echoing gongs measuring the distance to her final exit as they walked passed her dilapidating frame.
It had been three nights and she was terrified of sleeping on the floor, again.
I would not wish the same on the Zimbabwean patient who was “berated” by Limpopo Health MEC Phophi Ramathuba’s rant that undocumented foreigners are “killing” hospitals.
Official statistics and audit reports suggest that lack of consequence management, irregular expenditure and shocking vacancy rates is what is “killing” hospitals and health care, not immigrants. They suggest that Ramathuba’s comments toward the patient were incorrect and misguided.
I suppose we are playing musical chairs, but instead, we are using beds; eliminating patients – illegal immigrants and locals, in no particular order – while listening to Ramathuba’s verbal assault.
I suppose this is what the human race is. Humans – illegal immigrants and locals, in no particular order – carrying their wounds, racing to the public hospital, they serve the first to arrive there, no wound is deeper.
And when you are waiting they give you a thin blanket that fails to keep the cold floor at bay.
By some strange osmosis, it binds to your bones.
Your body grows roots of frost and plants itself on the hospital floor.
You would shiver, gradually fading away, you would quiver.
I can’t say there was an undocumented foreign national on a bed my aunt could have laid on, but the needs of many outweigh the feelings of the lady who was “berated” by Limpopo Health MEC Phophi Ramathuba’s rant about migrants from Zimbabwe being a huge strain on the health-care system.
Like the staff of Moses, Ramathuba’s video of her chastising the bedridden foreign national split opinions.
The staff may have rattled a burning bush, or perhaps parted ways and activated waves, but not all South Africans would waiver their privilege on the matter.
A few years after the death of my aunt, a cousin of mine also met her final exit under similar circumstances.
The lack of consequence management, irregular expenditure and shocking vacancy rates and other reasons why our health system is dying, as shown by official statistics and audit reports, is part of the problem – as is an influx of illegal immigrants.
While you were reading this, someone else is wrapped in a thin blanket, on a hospital floor, awaiting their fate.
* Rabbie Serumula is an author, poet and commentator.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the DFA.
