On 23rd July 2020 I wrote an unknowingly prophetic piece on the Cancer of Corruption in Health. In that I used examples of corruption in the health sector that I had encountered in the past. In doing so, I had no idea that the cancer that I had described and which I concluded could be excised by good and honest leadership had progressed to such an advanced stage in South African society. At a time of crisis, with the country threatened on many fronts by an unprecedented pandemic, one would have assumed that even the most hardened criminal would have hesitated to steal the scarce resources needed to save the…
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The Cancer of Corruption in Health
Corruption is a word that has become all too familiar in the lexicon of the ordinary South African. Billions rands of government funds have ended up in the hands of corrupt individuals many of whom by virtue of their positions should have been people with integrity and above reproach. Transparency International reports that the Corruption Perceptions Index places the country at 71 out of the 180 countries. The 2017 Corruption Watch annual report quotes the then Economic Development Minister as estimating that corruption costs the public sector at least R27 billion annually. During my initial experience heading the Free State health Department in the late 1990’s I uncovered corruption at…
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Winter of discontent …
I live in Cape Town where the last few days have been cold and windswept … bleak or bucolic could be other adjectives to describe the weather but also the psyche of the nation. We have lived through over 100 days of varying restrictions euphemistically termed “Alert levels” determined by a Command Council of politicians, we are again subject to power outages euphemistically terms “Load shedding” rather than power failures defined according to various “levels” of severity, today it is level 2 and finally here in the Western Cape while the rains pours down there are water restrictions at “level 3”. It seems to me we are a country of…
