Call for administration of Gauteng health amid corruption concerns

ActionSA has demanded that the Gauteng health department should be placed under administration, but more competent officials with no political connections should be hired directly by the Public Service Commission in all public health facilities.

ActionSA MP Dr Kgosi Letlape, a medical practitioner by profession, said the question of placing the provincial health department under administration had been under discussion by the parliamentary health portfolio committee, in which Letlape served.

He said it has been a question of when that should happen.

Gauteng health in news for wrong reasons

The provincial health department had been in the news for all the wrong reasons, including the Life Esidimeni saga, where mentally sick patients were removed from private health institutions and placed with non-governmental organisations that had no experience or expertise to do the job.

Many died as a result of poor care, and several senior officials were taken to task over the issue while then Health MEC Qedani Mahlangu was forced to resign.

Also, the department saw a senior official in the finance section, Babita Deokarant, being assassinated after she blew the whistle about massive corruption that took place in the department.

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Various hospitals in the province had been embroiled in numerous poor delivery fiascos, including the oncology section crisis at Charlotte Maxeke and in other facilities.

Letlape described the department as a “disaster zone,” and the people and health services in the province were struggling due to inept service provision by the department. He called for national intervention in the form of placing the department under administration.

Letlape said placing it under administration was an opportunity to improve services, including procurements, while the Special Investigative Unit expanded its probe into widespread corruption in the department.

Opportunity to improve services

The fact that the department received the largest slice of the provincial budget, had the highest number of tertiary health institutions, and had numerous challenges of procurement made it an important candidate for service improvement.

Besides, service providers and accounts were not paid due to maladministration while healthcare workers operated under the strain of long hours and unbearable conditions at the province’s facilities.

The situation had prompted even MEC for finance Lebogang Maile to declare the department as a burden on the provincial financial resources.

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Letlape said a solution was to stop political deployments in the public service, which resulted in the appointment of incompetent personnel in the public facilities.

“Civil service appointments should be based on merit and for people that could do the job, and there should be no political interference in them doing their jobs. There should be transparency in terms of procurement, transparency in terms of tenders, and we need to procure from the original equipment manufacturers,” Letlape said.

There must be a principle adopted for public servants to get their healthcare from their local public healthcare facilities.

Call for PSC to be properly resourced

Letlape called for the PSC to be properly resourced and funded to ensure it did its work properly and to ensure all public servants were employed in terms of the PSC policies. He suggested that a head department must be apolitical and all political appointments must be banned in the public service.

He said, in fact, political interference must be criminalised while health was made a national competency instead of falling under the provincial administration. This would also help to hold one person, the Minister of Health, accountable for all failures, including poor performance and inept service delivery.

Attempts to get comment from the Gauteng provincial health department failed.

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