Mailbox: The sick and forgotten in South Africa

Key topicsState hospitals are plagued by neglect and inefficiencyElders face shameful treatment in the healthcare systemLeadership failure blamed for systemic collapse.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Richard J Mann .I took an 88-year-old old lady to one of the state hospitals that Mr Ramaphosa lauded in his Tintswalo state of the nation address.The purpose of a hospital visit is to be treated by a medical practitioner as soon as is humanly possible. Not so in South Africa.We queued for receipts. Then we queued at the file issuing window for over an hour, invisible to the administrative staff who passed back and forth, some of them shuffling as if they had long lost the will to live. No one spoke to us. No one needed at us (perhaps some did look through us). All questions or complaints were met with curt, 'why are you bothering me' type responses. Add to this the joys of being directed to some five different offices to no avail. An alien visitor, fresh off his starship, would observe a small, obviously upper-class group of humans behind counters, lording it over a large group of peasant supplicants. No different from apartheid's finest hour. The concept of service is clearly an archaic, colonialist bit of nonsense.Of Ubuntu there was no sign. uBulongwe ( manure) and uBunja (look it up) were much in evidence. Many scams, many frauds, many evils are perpetrated in South Africa, often by those who swore to serve. This is one of the worst: the shameful way in which your parents, grandparents, elders are treated. It's an abomination hidden in plain view. You and I silently consent. Shame on you South Africa. Shame on you, ANC.All of this must be laid at the door of leadership - from lowest ranking supervisor to the president of South Africa. 'Ah, but we are struggling with resources'. I worked once at a primary healthcare NGO (doing work that rightly belongs to provincial and national Healthcare). The NGO relied to a large extent on donors, in a continuous struggle for survival. Patients would bypass their nearest clinics to attend that particular clinic. Why? Service, of course. Just two minor examples: All complaints by patients were examined at executive meetings and were followed up on until resolved.Doctors, cleaners or anyone else who came across lost or bewildered patients accompanied them to where they needed to be - accompanied, not directed. That is the much mumbled about organisational culture in action. Many doctors, nurses and others who could have earned more in state institutions, preferred working at the clinic. Interesting to speculate why.I watched a video recently, extolling our riches in minerals, arable land, wildlife, scenic landscapes, diversity. All of these make us a nation and a country poised to make a mark on the world. All of these, the politicians, and in particular the ANC, have managed to gut and destroy.The story, and perhaps the future, of a nation can be read on the faces of its people in the crowds. Here, you will read frustration, helplessness, defeat. No thriving country was ever built on these. One imagines that bread queues in the Soviet Union and other workers' paradises wore that look.South Africa, the answer is simple, if not necessarily easy. Lance the boil. Sever the gangrenous limbs. Here is a simple truth: as long as the incompetent, the corrupt, the clowns are mystifyingly elevated to leadership roles that they are manifestly unsuited for, we will languish in this swamp. As long as we lie to ourselves that it is fine and normal to tolerate indifference, laziness, corruption and incompetence, South Africans will wallow in drawn-out misery. For as long as we mistake tired clichès and worn-out slogans for truth and action, we will remain a doomed people, shuffling toward an inevitable going out, 'not with a bang, but with a whimper'.

Mailbox: The sick and forgotten in South Africa

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