How justice was won in Esidimeni case
Three-year battle waged by a committed few
● Former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke’s landmark ruling this week that every survivor and family of those who died in the Esidimeni tragedy be paid R1.2-million was hailed as a huge victory.
But for Cassey Chambers it was a bittersweet moment.
Chambers, the operations director of the South African Depression and Anxiety Group, was one of the first people to take up the fight for the rights of the Esidimeni patients, back in October 2015.
It has been a rocky road for her. She has walked with the families of those who lost loved ones during the journey.
Chambers was almost surprised this week when she started crying while speaking to the Sunday Times.
She thought of the lives she couldn’t save. “I don’t know what else I could have done. I could have camped outside the Gauteng health department for days. But would it have helped? Probably not,” she said.
She was referring to her many unsuccessful efforts to convince the department not to move vulnerable and mentally ill patients out of Esidimeni care centres.
She first heard of the department’s plan during a psychiatry conference in September 2015 when a psychiatrist told her about the termination of the Esidimeni contract.
The following month, families started calling Chambers’s group as news broke that Esidimeni’s three homes would be closed.
Chambers met Section 27 lawyer Sasha Stevenson and legal researcher John Stevens and discussed the predicament of many severely ill psychiatric patients who would have nowhere to go.
They realised that “hell, this is really big” and Stevenson called attorney Umunyana Rugege from Section 27 to join them.
Section 27, Sadag and families raised concerns with the health department.
Chambers began meeting families, witnessing their anger as they begged officials not to evict the patients. She spoke to families on WhatsApp and took phone calls day and night — something she still does today.
In December 2015 they went to court to ensure the termination of the contract with Esidimeni did not harm vulnerable patients.
Chambers provided a 300-page affidavit spearheading the case. She said Sadag had never in its 24 years been to court or organised protests.
“This was a really big risk,” she said, one that threatened funding options for the NGO and needed approval by the group’s board.
Just before Christmas 2015, the department agreed that patients would be properly assessed and given good care — as good as or better than they had received at Esidimeni.
Despite this, the department began planning to move 55 patients into a children’s home. One patient was 100 years old, others had been described as “hypersexual”.
In March 2016, Chambers, then pregnant with her second child, was in the midst of an urgent court bid to stop the move. The group lost after the department successfully argued that patients were well enough to be moved and discharged.
About 1 400 patients were moved in what Moseneke later described as an “arbitrary mass discharge” or a “stampede”.
Two years later, 144 patients were dead and the department’s reasons for having moved them were rejected by Moseneke as “vacuous and irrational” and “false”.
Moseneke described the “harrowing account of death, torture and disappearance of utterly vulnerable mental-health care users”. He found the state had so breached people’s rights that he had to award constitutional damages to the 135 claimants.
He instructed the department to plan how to improve the treatment of mentally ill people and report back every six months.
Chambers said she had not expected the payout to be so high.
“It was such a validation of what we had been through. It was profound to hear him pick up on the same things we had: that government had lied, that evidence had been fabricated. He was eloquent and powerful.
“It’s been a journey of nearly three years. We have finally been taken seriously.”
Chambers hopes that mental health is now recognised by the government. “Esidimeni must never happen again.”
Harrowing account of death, torture and disappearance Dikgang Moseneke Chairman of the hearing into Esidimeni deaths