Limpopo MEC for health Dr Phophi Ramathuba exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the ANC, its cadres and its voters. In her rant at a hospital patient last week she displayed the party’s extraordinary failure to self-reflect and correct its mistakes; its willingness to play to the gallery and dip its toe in the dirty pool of populism; and its total embrace of mendacity and deceit.
The power dynamic of the scene last week was shocking. A woman who had been in a car accident in Zimbabwe lay on a hospital bed, ailing and helpless. The glamorous Ramathuba, surrounded by the kind of people who are only in their jobs because they love saying “yes, minister” and laughing at a higher-up’s unfunny jokes, is talking down to this injured person and showing off to the camera. It is incredible that anyone who has a passing knowledge of the Hippocratic Oath would indulge in this sort of bullying, but that is what this doctor does.
She tells the patient: “You speak Shona? Then how do you find yourself in Bela-Bela when you are supposed to be with [Zimbabwe leader Emmerson] Mnangagwa? You’re killing my health system.
“You are supposed to be with Mnangagwa; you know he doesn’t give me money to operate on you guys, and I’m operating with my limited budget ... That is why when my people want health services, they can’t get [them]. And that is endangering the community ... This is unfair.”
It’s all lies. Let’s take Ramathuba’s words in turn. How did that woman find herself in SA? Well, when late “leader” Robert Mugabe was destroying the Zimbabwe health system, driving doctors out of the country (many now practise in this country, Botswana, the UK, Canada and many other parts of the world), it was SA which encouraged and protected him from international sanction for 20 years between 1999 and 2019.
The health system in Limpopo is broken. It is on life support and in critical need of resuscitation. Each day we hear reports of collapse, pain, indignity, loss, shock and grief.
— Treatment Action Campaign
While Zimbabwean opposition leaders were begging SA to denounce Mugabe, the ANC’s leaders and members were giving the man standing ovations. The result of Mugabe’s rule was that everything collapsed: health collapsed, the economy collapsed, the education system collapsed. This is why that wretched Zimbabwean woman was in that hospital bed in Bela Bela — the ANC helped its friend Mugabe collapse the health system in Zimbabwe.
Ironically, Mugabe received all his medical care in Singapore at one of the world’s best hospitals, some 8,000km away from the country he had ruined. When he died, Ramathuba’s party, the ANC, said it mourned the passing of “our brother Comrade President Robert Gabriel Mugabe, who passes away having devoted his life to the service of his country and his people”. Service? He destroyed the country!
Ramathuba said her hospitals are “operating with my limited budget ... that is why when my people want health services, they can’t get [them]”.
Ramathuba knows public hospitals in her province — and everywhere else in SA except the DA-run Western Cape — have crumbled due to the ANC’s cluelessness, corruption and arrogance. In November 2017 the Treatment Action Campaign marched to her office and told her: “The health system in Limpopo is broken. It is on life support and in critical need of resuscitation. Each day we hear reports of collapse, pain, indignity, loss, shock and grief.”
There was a litany of failures: overcrowding, over-stretched staff, medicine shortages, buildings in disrepair, no safe running water, poor equipment. Was that the Zimbabweans’ fault? If so, why didn’t she say so then? And why hasn’t she fixed the system after five years?
Health in SA has collapsed because, as we saw with the assassination of Babita Deokaran and the fiasco at Thembisa Hospital, which ordered R500,000’s worth of “skinny jeans”, the ANC’s deployed cadres are stealing from its own government. Corruption, the ANC’s corruption, is the culprit. But Ramathuba won’t say that.
Let’s be clear: the ANC might as well have brought that woman from across the border to that hospital bed in Limpopo. It aided and abetted the architects of her distress and poverty, it failed to run an administration that can police its borders, it failed to run a clean and efficient home affairs department — and it is failing now to speak up when the very same Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was ushered into power by President Cyril Ramaphosa, arrests, detains and jails opposition activists while driving Zimbabwe further into penury.
Ramathuba is climbing on the Aaron Motsoaledi-Operation Dudula-ActionSA bandwagon of blaming foreigners for the ANC’s incompetence and corruption. She is playing with fire. Her words will encourage many to target foreigners and, as we saw in the past, beat and kill them.
SA needs to stand in front of a mirror and take a cold, hard look at itself. We are in trouble, and the reason we are here is that the ANC’s corruption and incompetence has been allowed to go on for too long. No amount of blaming Zimbabweans will take that away.
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