Follow the money trail
THE Gauteng premier needs to launch a fullscale inquiry into how 27 NGOs obtained fake licences to allow them to take in patients who needed mental health care, according to #letthetruthcomeout.
It continued: “We need to know who is benefiting here and which politicians are setting up patronage pipelines in the NPO sector. This is a minimum required if we are to get to the bottom of all of this.”
That is one of the obvious follow-ups in the biggest scandal to hit democratic South Africa – the deaths of at least 94 mental health patients – to follow the money.
Those business people lining their pockets are the ones to spend the longest time in jail, but so too the politicians. We say: especially the politicians, for ours are supposed to be of a special type.
They represent a people who liberated themselves from the horror of apartheid, including the money-making scheme of business people, in collusion with politicians, of converting disused mine hostels into “mental homes” for blacks, in appalling conditions.
Many were subjected to electro-convulsive therapy – electric shocks – to reduce them to vegetative states, to increase permanent patient numbers; and, of course, there was a generous state subsidy for every “patient”, along with kickbacks for politicians.
The worst insult for today’s politicians has always been to denounce them as being just like apartheid’s ones. But who can blame us today.
For how can they explain that on their watch they betrayed the most vulnerable in society – the psychologically challenged. It’s not like they didn’t know. From Gandhi to Madiba, we have been taught that the measure of any civilised society is how it cares for those who can least look after themselves.
And many of the 94 died in the most pitiful of circumstances, of cold and hunger. It makes us weep. All in the heartless pursuit of money.
We can only redeem ourselves as a people if we put to the sword those politicians “setting up patronage pipelines in the NPO sector”.
Otherwise future generations will say we were just like apartheid. Heaven forbid.