PALI LEHOHLA | It’s among the dead that we must seek the living

This Sunday the world celebrated Easter. Luke 24:5:7 says as they were afraid and bowed their faces to the earth, they said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Cause of death is especially important to understand because to save the living you should know and understand what killed the dead. My column is a medley of health, life and death and what can be done about it.

On March 13-14, the Global Enterprise Network (GEN) was hosted in Cape Town. I met interesting people there, one being Prof Eldrid Jordaan, who is an innovator of note, having come up with GovChat and is CEO of Suppple Plc. The other was Anvil Nel of LIFELINE TECH.

While at GEN I got a call that a third relative had passed on. That was in as many days. A week ago, I was home in Lesotho, where we buried these three members of the family who lived in the same village. They were from different age groups but they happened to have died one after the other at different health facilities with one of the symptoms being common cause — a stroke that contributed to their deaths. I was asking myself what the meaning of all this was, more so that all the families had moved from Qibing village to Matholeng over four decades. The statistical probability of this happening was beyond impossible.

Stats SA, the department of health and the department of home affairs in 1998 undertook an elaborate process at the instigation of Stats SA to improve the recording of cause of death. Today on an annual basis Stats SA produces a near-complete profile not only about the number of people who died by geographic location but what they died from. The then-dreaded HIV and Aids would lead insurance companies not to honour their obligation to pay out insurance, and as a consequence medical doctors protecting the benefits of their patients would not record what killed them.

Having taken painstaking steps to seek the living among the dead for cause of death and calling upon the three departments to work together to secure this knowledge base to save the living, I faced immense disappointment.

In January 2001, my cousin passed away in Cross Roads, Cape Town. I arrived at the clinic and met the medical officer who attended to him. I asked for the forms that are usually filled in. Upon inspecting these, I realised there was an omission, and I asked the officer, why is this left blank? The officer said it is for statistics, it is not important. For a moment I faced the dilemma of why I sought the living among the dead. I was the chief mourner of my cousin and the chief mourner of statistics, and I certainly could not do both simultaneously.

My cousin was more important. I decided to mourn my cousin and mourn statistics much later. I shared this story repeatedly at Stats SA, and one of the officials took on the challenge of training medical doctors on the essence of seeking the living among the dead. She proposed a training programme and I was very sceptical, having experienced the wrath of the medical officer over whether this would succeed. The results were amazing when we held a workshop of seeking the living among the dead. As a consequence, we explored the possibility of embedding our statistical programme in medical schools.

On Tuesday, as I was driving in my area of Meyerspark, I got hailed down by an elderly person walking on crutches. It was at about 5pm. When I stopped and lowered my window, I listened to distress and trouble all over. The man had been discharged from Steve Biko at 7am in the morning, and he was going to Mpumalanga and was trying to get to the Daniboom Station in Mamelodi, where he could catch a train home. I asked him to hop in the car, and off to the railway station we went.

His was a heart-rending story. He had been at Steve Biko for three months after being involved in an accident. He pulled up his trouser leg to show me what remained of his leg. His family did not know of his distress, and he had not seen them for the three months of his stay in hospital. I tried to persuade him to stay overnight at my place and leave the next morning, he said no, something tells me I have to arrive and I will arrive home this evening. He needed R240 to get home. A neighbour in Meyerspark had given him a hundred and I added two hundred. I took him to the station and asked a young man there to take him to the train. This reminded me of Census 1996, where in enumerating the homeless, I came across a person who had been involved in an accident, was hospitalised, had lost his job and had lost contact with his family, who were in Cape Town. When morning flashed the news of the interview, the census team was contacted by a family member from Cape Town.

Back to GEN in Cape Town, Anvil Nel of LIFELINE TECH could not let me go as we were engrossed in the technology he is developing to track your health virtually, so that any condition evolving and threatening life can be detected and acted upon remotely. In an instance of a car accident the technology would send a signal to a centre that would remit a message to relatives. Through these technological advancements many unnecessary deaths could be avoided, and loved ones could be contacted wherever they are about their relatives.

Luke 24:7:5 says: “So the women became very afraid and they went down low with their faces on the ground. The men said to the women, ‘This is a place to bury dead people. You should not be looking here for someone who is alive.’” The cause-of-death statistics and Alvin Nel’s inquisitive mind about why the dead died proves that it is among the dead that we must seek the living, and an evolving stroke could be quickly arrested and attended to, while in an instance of an accident the message can not only be transmitted to the medical profession but to the loved ones. The next column will be on Prof Eldrid Jordaan’s technology that helps keep the living alive and healthy. GEN was introduced to South Africa and Africa by Kizito Okechuku of GEN 22 On Sloane.

Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa