Will it be funerals for empty caskets?
The 20 Life Esidimeni patients still missing should be ‘assumed dead’, says DA
The Gauteng health department still cannot locate 20 state mental health patients it removed from Life Esidimeni facilities almost three years ago. Acting health MEC Faith Mazibuko confirmed this in a written reply to questions posed by Jack Bloom, the Democratic Alliance MPL in Gauteng, in the provincial legislature on Wednesday. Mazibuko, who serves as Gauteng’s MEC for sport‚ arts‚ culture and recreation, is filling in for health MEC Gwen Ramokgopa while she is on leave.
In 2015, former Gauteng health MEC Qedani Mahlangu decided to terminate a long-standing contract with Life Esidimeni facilities to provide care for state mental health patients. She then moved almost 1700 patients from the private hospitals mainly to ill-equipped and unlicensed community nongovernmental organisations. At least 144 of them died and some went missing.
Bloom released the list of names of 20 of those still missing on Thursday morning. A quarter of the patients described were sent to the Mosego Home in Krugersdorp, to Atteridgeville’s Rebafenyi Centre outside Pretoria or to the nearby Tshepong NGO. The Gauteng health department does not know where six of the people whose names appear on the list were transferred to after the 2015 and 2016 removals.
“I am concerned that the three patients sent to Tshepong could have died and been secretly buried as it’s known that this NGO did six illegal burials of Esidimeni patients without death certificates and may have done more,” Bloom says.
In February, Bloom maintained that as many as 48 former Life Esidimeni patients could not be accounted for. Until now, however, Gauteng provincial spokesperson Thabo Masebe said the department had located most of the missing patients after sifting through patient data. “When we cleaned the data, [we found] some of the people were actually duplicates. Some were using different names. Most of those people were actually found,” he told Bhekisisa late last week.
As of Wednesday night, Masebe was unavailable for comment on new revelations from Bloom, who says it might be time to give up the search for the lost patients.
“It’s been two years now, and we can’t trace them. Unfortunately, one would have to assume that many of them are no longer alive,” he argues.
But Gauteng health department spokesperson Lesemang Matuka says it is not possible to declare missing people officially dead without evidence. Bloom argues that the health department should intensify its search by making the names and photos of patients public.
Matuka says the department is working with the South African Police Service and the department of social development to trace patients by using their identity numbers and tracking social grant payments.
The health department also says it is working to find five more mental health patients who were not at Life Esidimeni. One such patient is 61-year-old Mohlalifi Seqala, who has been missing for more than 35 years. He was admitted to a mental health facility in Randfontein, west of Johannesburg, in 1978. Seqala was last seen in the 1980s, when the institution closed down.
Seqala’s sister, Mieta Zulu, has been searching for her brother for just over two years. She used part of her state pension to make the nearly 300km round trip from Potchefstroom in North West to Johannesburg and Pretoria to scour the wards of mental health facilities in the hope of finding Seqala.
In 2016, she says a security guard outside Life Esidimeni’s Randfontein hospital told her he had seen Seqala being transferred with others to the state-run Cullinan Care and Rehabilitation Centre. But Gauteng’s health department and Life Healthcare, which operates Life Esidimeni facilities, say Seqala was never a patient there.
“I have no peace in my heart because of my missing brother. It’s painful. I think about him when I eat, sleep, bath and dress. I don’t know where he is and what kind of situation he’s in,” Zulu says.
Officials in the Gauteng mental health directorate are prioritising Seqala’s case and have told her to be hopeful, she says, but she is desperate for closure. “I want to find my brother, even if it’s his grave. I just need to know where he is.”