Health official grilled

DAY three of the Life Esidimeni alternative dispute resolution was fraught with frustration and characterised by vague answers and unsatisfactory witness testimony.

The hearing is intended to offer closure for the families of at least 118 mentally ill patients who died as a result of the Health Department’s decision to transfer more than 1 700 patients from Life Esidimeni facilities into inadequately resourced NGO’s.

Lawyers for the families and the head of the hearings yesterday pressed Gauteng Health Chief Planning Director, Levy Mosenogi, for answers about who took the decision to transfer the patients into NGOs.

Mosenogi, who was a project manager responsible for the patients’ removal, had a hard time giving direct answers and at times conceded to not being aware of certain developments at various stages of the planned moves.

He also admitted to not reading letters from organisations opposed to the transfers.

Legal Aid counsel Lilla Crouse asked Mosenogi if he had read a judgment in March last year in which a high court judge had cautioned the department against placing adults with children, and the potential overcrowding it would cause.

Mosenogi said he did not remember if he had read the judgment Crouse was referring to, only saying he had “read a lot of papers during that time”.

Crouse asked: “As a responsible project manager, you would have read the judgment. To make sure what the judge says. Don’t you agree with me now thinking back to it?”

After a long silence, Mosenogi responded that he had. Under further interrogation he admitted to only becoming aware of the first death four months after it occurred.

Former Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, who is heading the proceedings, was at pains to get clarity on why Mosenogi forged ahead with a decision that resulted in the multiple deaths.

“Why did you do this? Why did you move people to NGOs with no proper service level agreements? With no resources?”

Earlier Mosenogi admitted that officials had been aware that the NGOs to which the department moved the patients to did not have the 2 000 beds required to accommodate all of them.

Contestation

“I should have been much stronger in my contestation of this thing. Maybe I should have pulled out.

“It did cross my mind that maybe I should pull out, but when I saw the conditions the patients were in, I thought maybe I would make a difference,” Mosenogi said.

He added that he had raised concerns about moving patients to the ill-equipped NGOs in prayer meetings he had attended, as well as informally with his comrades at branches, after the former MEC, Qedani Mahlangu, failed to act on them. Mahlangu was painted as “difficult to reach”.

Chief Justice Moseneke asked him why he didn’t then raise the issue with someone more senior than the MEC.

“I should have done that,” Mosenogi responded.

“I think I should have raised it formally. And also I should have raised it with the premier.”