Go public with Gordhan’s private care

The five Ws and an H. They’re the absolute basics of journalism. Who, what, where, when, why and how.

Last week, the family of Pravin Gordhan, the former minister of public enterprises, released a press statement saying he was gravely ill and had been admitted to hospital, where he was “receiving the best possible medical care”.

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The immediate question for any journalist worth their salt – and, it appears, many people on social media – was the obvious omission: to where was Gordhan admitted?

Why was this mystery hospital, lauded by the family, not named?

Gordhan was a public figure, an ANC stalwart and a rigidly hardline SA Communist Party ideologue.

What kind of hospital he chose to be admitted on his deathbed – whether it was public or private – would inevitably be an act with political ramifications.

After all, Gordhan’s party, in which he held a lifetime of high office, had recently passed controversial legislation that when implemented will not so much transform, as destroy, the private health care sector.

Just prior to Gordhan’s hospitalisation, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi was scathing about those who argue that a citizen has a constitutional right to pay out of their own pocket for private health care.

They are racists, Motsoaledi says. One of Gordhan’s closest comrades, Solly Mapaila, general secretary of the SACP, was one of the select few allowed to visit him in hospital.

Back at the office, Mapaila rails against users of private hospitals as “reactionary elements who want to perpetuate inequality”.

So why did it take a week for the first news outlet to report that Gordhan’s final days were spent at the elite, privately operated Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre?

It was surely newsworthy that Gordhan, a staunch socialist, was eschewing the public system? And how does this deathbed dallying with capitalism reconcile with the SACP’s eulogy of him as “true to communist principles” to the end?

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When Deputy President Paul Mashatile passed out during a meeting, every report made the not-so-subtle point that he had been taken to a private hospital.

The difference between the reporting of the two incidents is not accidental. Mashatile is deservedly reviled by the pro-Ramaphosa media as a corrupt thug sympathetic to the state-looting Zuma faction.

Gordhan is the hero who stood up to the state looters and was consequently vilified for this. The reality is more nuanced.

While it is true that Gordhan stoutly resisted the depredations of the Zuma faction, his anticorruption efforts were conspicuously less energetic.

According to the auditor-general, there was R44.5 billion in irregular expenditure at SAA in the four years to 2023.

Transnet has lost around R23 billion to corruption since 2009. Eskom a staggering R203 billion.

This took place under Gordhan’s watch. As far back 2021, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter made public his concerns over the awarding of contracts to ANC-connected entities. Gordhan did nothing.

In 2022, De Ruyter named to Gordhan two Cabinet ministers of whom there was evidence of ongoing involvement in corrupt procurement contracts. Gordhan shrugged his shoulders.

There is, admittedly, much to eulogise about Gordhan’s contributions to democracy.

But there is plenty to suggest he tolerated the thievery of a corrupt ANC elite on whose support Ramaphosa’s presidency critically depends.

Sycophantic news outlets do themselves and South Africa a disservice.

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