Inquiry call over deaths at Esidimeni

DA LEADER Mmusi Maimane has called on President Jacob Zuma to establish a commission of inquiry into the Esidimeni tragedy which claimed the lives of more than 100 people in mental health facilities in Gauteng.

Maimane said he had written to Zuma to call on him to establish a judicial commission of inquiry into the deaths as he had done following the 34 deaths at Marikana.

The death toll, initially set at 94, has been revised to more than 100 and could continue to rise as more information is gathered.

He said the inquiry should look into “exactly what transpired, how it was allowed to transpire, what national government’s role was and ought to have been and to identify shortcomings in the current system”.

DA spokesman on health, Wilmot James, said while the health ombudsman’s report was comprehensive, there were several questions. It did not have a mandate to investigate why Gauteng health MEC Qedani Mahlangu decided to move patients from the Life Healthcare Esidimeni facility to 27 NGOs, apparently in a bid to save money, when the budget for mental healthcare had been significantly underspent.

He said the role of the national health department, Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, and the “chronic collapse of communication” in his office also needed to be probed.

Maimane said that while mental healthcare was a provincial competency, it was the national department which had made the decision to place patients at Esidimeni.

He said it had also emerged that several NGOs had started to take legal action to stop the patients from Esidimeni in December 2015, but had been persuaded to abandon the legal route by the department’s directorgeneral Malebona Matsoso.

James said the ombudsman’s report suggested the matter be handed over to the police and the Hawks which would mean that inquests into each death, conducted by a magistrate, would need to occur.

This, he said, would mean that bodies may need to be exhumed as it was not clear if postmortems were performed in all cases.

James said one of the failures in the South African system was that the Office for Health Standards Compliance, which monitored health facilities including mental health facilities, did not have any inspection powers for NGOs. — TMG