The Kimberley Mental Hospital has been a feeding trough for corruption since before its first brick was laid. Over 20 years, and more than R2,1 billion later, it remains an uninhabitable monument to corruption.
The damning findings of the Health Ombud, Professor Taole Mokoena, around critical staff shortages, the lack of senior clinicians and inadequate health care provision at the mental hospital and the Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe hospital, require urgent attention. But this must not overshadow the underlying dysfunctionality of the Kimberley mental hospital, and provincial health management’s persistent failure to act on it.
It is clear from Professor Mokoena’s report that patients “froze to death”, dying from hypothermia and pneumonia, during the more than 12-month period during which the facility was left powerless and without warmth, following incidents of cable theft.
For the past fifteen years, the DA has cautioned of ongoing corruption and mismanagement at the facility, from construction phase to its eventual operationalization. Last year, before news of the deaths broke, the DA warned that the mental hospital posed a hotbed of risks to patients and staff. We called on Health MEC Maruping Lekwene and Acting HOD, Mxolisi Mlatha, for a high-level intervention, to no avail. The Department of Labour subsequently also threatened the hospital with a looming prohibition notice.
The DA won’t let health care professionals be blamed for the deaths of mental health patients. Instead they must hold provincial health management accountable. They are the ones who continue to deny the collapse of provincial healthcare and allow gross human rights violations against mental health care users and state patients to continue.
Instead of attacking burnt out, short-staffed and under-resourced doctors and nurses, the Minister must restore stability to the top provincial management of the health department. This is a department led by an Acting HOD and an Acting CFO, who stand in for a criminally convicted HOD, and a CFO fingered in PPE corruption, who continue to earn top salaries while occupying alternate positions within the department.
This dysfunctionality, deeply entrenched within the provincial health system, peaked at the mental hospital and must be fixed from the top-down to restore integrity, management and care within the provincial health sector.