The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Northern Cape welcomes the scheduling of oversight visits by the Northern Cape Provincial Legislature to medical facilities in the province as a first step in the long overdue implementation of the health oversight strategy.
Oversight, starting next week, follows a damning report from the Auditor-General on the department’s finances. The department ended the 2024/25 financial year with an overdraft as well as cash shortfalls and claims amounting to 16% and 29% of the next year’s budget respectively. Since it takes the department an average of five months to pay a solitary bill, rapidly accelerating interest depletes its coffers even further.
Although the department finally appointed a Loss Control Committee, the committee failed to investigate any of the R15.5 billion in irregular expenditure or the R140 million in fruitless and wasteful expenditure sitting on the department’s books.
It doesn’t seem as if a single cent allocated to this department has been spent in full accordance with the law for some time and yet leadership failed to take any corrective action. The current lack of a political head is symptomatic of broader instability, as seven different members of the executive council have been deployed to this portfolio in the past twelve years.
As the department now obtained its thirteenth qualified audit in a row, the time has come for oversight structures like the Legislature to tighten our monitoring and evaluation of the departmental affairs. Premier Zamani Saul admitted in September this year that the state of the mental health hospital, which he previously described as “a monument of corruption”, is “an embarrassment” to the Northern Cape. Clearly, we cannot afford any delays in improving and implementing proper oversight.