NHI needs to be shelved until clean water can be provided

South African expat Dave Matthews had a song in 1998, Don’t Drink the Water. Maybe he was on to something.

The principle of wanting healthcare for all South Africans is laudable. It’s something we’ve been promised since the inception of our Bill of Rights. It’s in there-right in section 27, just above the right to “sufficient food and water”.

Unfortunately, the constitution does not specify how clean that water must be but I’m yet to meet a politician brazen enough to tell the family of cholera victims, “We gave them water but we didn’t need to make sure it was clean”.

Yet, we do have a bunch of parliamentarians brazen enough to think that a country that can’t keep lights on, negligently poisons its citizens, can’t maintain a rail system, breaks a national airline and has a president who trusts a mattress over a bank… that country can totally run a national health initiative.

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This state of play of break things then pay for better things to break is exhausting and probably why the rand has lost 25% of its value in the last year. We can’t get the basics right but let’s move past that and onto the bigger things.

You’d need less healthcare if you actually took care of your people like you pretend to. It would be more affordable to treat a community’s health issues if that community didn’t have several sewers draining into the water source. You’d have more health practitioners if you managed your education and onboarding better. You’d get more professionals in public health if you actually treated them better or at least gave them the right tools to work with.

People would be more likely to boil their water if the price of electricity or other fuels didn’t keep rising, not that they should have to boil their water to make it safe to drink but we’ve been pushed into buying bottled water as if it’s a norm now.

Enough!

I know people think that a state can do many things at once so they can work on the quality of the water while implementing NHI but the evidence suggests that our state can hardly do one thing at once and when they do, they stuff it up.

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Death by cholera should be a thing of the past. There’s no reason to have an outbreak when prevention is just so simple; keep our water clean. Provide adequate service. It seems the only service we get these days is lip and while people may be applauding Fikile Mbalula’s whataboutism on the BBC, they’re blinded to the deaths caused by his team.

Even if we ignored the less obvious thing of death by failed service delivery, from Marikana to Life Esidimeni, it’s pretty evident that these okes don’t care about our lives. It’s amazing then that anybody can think that they care enough to be implementing an effective national health insurance. Even if they did care enough, you’d think they’d prioritise basic things that limit people’s need for healthcare.

Alas, it is not to be. This is the leadership that will make you happy to take the poison, give you a cure that they will charge another person for and keep you on a chronic prescription of the same poison.

Now that the bill is going to parliamentary debate, we’ll see just how clueless our leadership is about healthcare – which will be a frightening joy to observe. It will also be interesting to gauge the public sentiment on this idea and whether the broader public have faith in the ability of the state to implement such a thing.

Fortunately, this process may go beyond the term of this parliament and the bill, if not passed in time, will then expire… maybe that’s the idea.

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