|
|
South Africa: So Hard to Build, So Easy to Destroy
 |
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Health-e (Cape Town)
ANALYSIS
12 May 2008
Posted to the web 12 May 2008
Kerry Cullinan
Health MEC Peggy Nkonyeni's attempts to portray Dr Mark Blaylock as a racist threaten to undermine a well-functioning hospital and also undermine the ANC's principle of non-racialism.
It takes a long time to build a functioning health service, but a short time to destroy it. Rob Ferreira Hospital in Mpumalanga was once a hospital to be proud of. But an MEC, Sibongile Manana, believed that the hospital's leadership had undermined her authority by allowing a rape support organisation that dispensed anti-retrovirals to operate from the hospital.
So she fired the hospital superintendent and another doctor for insubordination. Eight doctors ended up leaving the hospital as a result and, although this happened seven years ago, Rob Ferreira has never recovered.
Manguzi Hospital in the far north of KwaZulu-Natal is doing pretty well. It has 18 doctors, and it offers a relatively good service particularly for people with HIV, despite being in the fourth poorest health district (out of 53) in the country.
But Health MEC Peggy Nkonyeni has decided that the hospital is a hotbed of racism and anarchy - mainly because one of the doctors, Dr Mark Blaylock, put her photograph in a dustbin while another, Dr Colin Pfaff, raised donor funds to buy extra ARVs for pregnant women.
KwaZulu-Natal has the worst health indicators in the country - the highest HIV and TB rates and the lowest life expectancy. There is a worldwide shortage of doctors, and ours are courted by a variety of countries. The health department can ill-afford to alienate overburdened health workers over petty issues.
Yet Nkonyeni used her Budget speech and a number of subsequent media interviews to portray Blaylock as a racist.
In an attempt to prove her claim, she has taken two prominent professors, a surgeon, a pathologist and an urologist out of their workplaces for 10 days to examine "racism, ill treatment of staff and abuse of departmental facilities by Dr Blaylock and some doctors operating at some of our rural facilities".
Blaylock should not have thrown Nkonyeni's photograph in the bin. He knows that and he has apologised.
But his one mistake in the heat of the moment - sparked by the MEC's remark that rural doctors were motivated by profit not caring -- should be balanced against his many years' service to the country's poorest patients.
For over a decade, he has chosen to serve black patients at both Manguzi and Edendale Hospitals. That's hardly the profile of a racist.
Certainly, the incidents that Nkonyeni has publicised from Blaylock's private personnel file show that he can be volatile. He pushed a radiographer who had reported drunk for work. He broke a pharmacy window because the pharmacist had failed to order anaesthetic drugs and he had a patient on the operating table requiring an emergency operation.
But his triggers were the fact that his colleagues' inefficiencies were compromising patient care, not racism.
If he had been a racist, he would not have cared that the black man on the operating table died because he couldn't get the operation he needed; he wouldn't have fought to get patients' X-rays so he could diagnose what ailed them.
Ascribing racist motives to every action without evidence is in direct contravention of our Constitution and out of step with the non-racial legacy of the ANC.
Crying racism without any evidence is the tactic of a weak leader who cannot muster any other defence, so resorts to emotion.
It is also a classic decoy strategy to draw attention away from one's own weaknesses. By attacking Blaylock in her Budget speech, Nkonyeni managed to deflect attention from the fact that her department had massively over-spent, thanks in large part to inadequate planning and poor allocation policies.
The ANC-inspired Freedom Charter recognised way back in 1955 that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white". Our Constitution echoes this, saying that the country "belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity".
|
But something has happened to the ANC of Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. It is no longer an organisation that has non-racialism as a core principle. At the same time, the cult of the individual has gripped the organisation, particularly in the provinces where MECs' images emblazon buses, billboards and newspaper adverts.
President Thabo Mbeki's ANC effectively replaced non-racialism with black African nationalism. Instead of seeking common ground between all South Africans, Mbeki has frequently resorted to racial blame - especially during election campaigns.
We are fast approaching next year's election, and Nkonyeni's growing assertiveness probably stems from the fact that she is firmly ensconced in Jacob Zuma's winning camp.
|
This is a prime example of why I left South Africa to practice medicine in Canada. Why would anybody in their right mind want to return to this?
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
