Couple describes how they escaped from appalling conditions

When 63 year old Theunis Kotzè fell down a flight of 18 stairs on April 30 at the Zanele Mbeki Frail Care Centre, the staff refused to take him to hospital.

Kotzè is blind, he is a diabetic and bound to a wheelchair because both his legs have been amputated.

He plummeted down the stairs – wheelchair and all, and as the doctors later discovered, he had broken his arm in the process.

He also sustained serious head- and neck injuries and to this day he simply cannot understand why he was refused treatment.

Had it not been for his fiancée Corné Olivier (38) who phoned the ambulance the following day (May 1) there is no telling just how long he would have remained in agony. Kotzè spent four days in hospital before he was returned to a place he describes as a “hell hole”.

“I was only in Zanele for a month and a half and it has to be the worst place any human being can find themselves in,” Kotzè told HERAUT.

He described how medication is simply shoved into the mouths of patients.

Sharing a room with a mentally unstable person wasn’t easy either, and he remembers how his roommate slept for days on end after the staff shoved pills down his throat.

What further blew his mind was that a decision was made to change his prescribed insulin after he complained about the food.

“I was on a certain type of insulin for 27 years and the one day they decided to change it. All Kotzè wanted was the six healthy meals diabetics need to avoid another hypoglycemic attack – that and to be treated with some form of dignity.

“In the time I was there we rarely received any vegetables or meat. It was pap, samp and other starches and it was the same food every single day.”

Kotzè said that the conditions of the toilets were even worse.

He said it was rare to find a toilet seat that wasn’t shattered and that he often had to have his hands inside the toilet bowl when he was fortunate enough to relieve himself.

Despite being blind, Kotzè said that the staff often refused to push him to the toilet. He added that many disabled people were left in their beds for days and that verbal abuse was not uncommon either.

Government allocates approximately R14 000 for each patient at Zanale Mbeki Frail Care Centre.

Olivier corroborated her fiancé’s statement and became very emotional when she described how dehumanising it was to spend a long weekend in bed.

“At one stage they decided I should wear adult nappies, but often when I asked for the nappy to be changed, I was ignored.”

“One long weekend they put me in bed on a Friday. I was only taken out of bed the following Tuesday.

“I was only in Zanele for four months, but I developed bedsores and although I reported that a certain patient sexually harassed me in the elevator on more than one occasion, the management simply ignored what I had to say.”

Olivier was born a quadriplegic and has undergone several operations throughout her life, yet she never though it possible that humans could treat each other with so little respect.

She had a tremble in her voice when speaking about the cold water bed baths she received and like Kotzè, she is today grateful that she is no longer reliant on the establishment for food.

“If I stayed there any longer I would have died, just like that lady who was raped,” she said.

HERAUT reported on March 15 that two women were raped at Zanele Mbeki Frail Care Centre – one of which died as a result thereof.

To date no feedback was forthcoming from the Department of Social Services. It was alleged that the rapist who had a preference for mentally instable women was simply asked to leave the centre. He was reportedly dropped off in a nearby township.

It is also understood that our informant who went on record with the rape allegations which took place under the watch of the centre’s staff, was removed from the facility. “If you complain or speak to the media they throw you out the next day,” Olivier said.

Kotzè’s son was made aware of the circumstances in March and immediately made a plan to get his dad and his fiancé out of there as quickly as possible.

“He saved us,” Olivier said while Kotzè is just happy that the opening at the ends of his lifeless limbs decreased from 4cm to just over 1cm since he started receiving better treatment at his son’s house in Krugersdorp.

*Click here to read out previous article on conditions at Zanele Mbeki Frail Care Centre