SOUTH Africa’s Health and Allied Workers Indaba Trade Union is relieved that deadly electricity blackouts have stopped in all health-care facilities.
The Health and Allied Workers Indaba Trade Union (Haitu) is relieved that the North Gauteng High Court has ordered the South African government to stop load shedding (power blackouts) in critical sectors of the economy.
This comes after Haitu met with attorneys Eric Mabuza and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi earlier this year to give detailed evidence about how load shedding was resulting in the deaths of patients.
Rich Sicina, Haitu President, said they were part of 18 other applicants who went to court, including the United Democratic Movement (UDM) and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), to make an urgent application to the High Court.
He said: ‘As a union, we were fed up with the fact that the government was refusing to intervene to alleviate this crisis in public hospitals and clinics.
‘We welcome the decision of the High Court to hand down this landmark judgment compelling the state to exempt all healthcare facilities, including clinics and hospitals.
‘When load shedding happens, patients who cannot breathe on their own must be resuscitated manually because the ventilators do not work, and when you add the fact that the majority of hospitals are grossly understaffed, it means that nurses must play God and choose whose life should be saved, which may result in other patients dying.’
Sicina stated that load shedding in the neo-natal units, where premature and sick babies are taken care of, is also unable to properly care for infants, which means that some may die.
In an affidavit submitted by Sicina on behalf of the union to the court, the party stated that ‘it’s a matter of life and death because the mortality rates go up with every power cut, especially if a person is on resuscitation or oxygen, and if things don’t go as planned, someone dies every time there is a power cut’.
This submission was backed up by Professor Rudo Mathiva of Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital.
Sicina added that this is why it was so important for Haitu to make submissions in this court case and that the majority of public hospitals are not exempt from load shedding, and not all of them have generators.
He stressed: ‘Even for those that are lucky enough to have them, those generators do not work all the time, and they do not provide electricity to the entire hospital.
‘At the same time, hospitals have to choose between having money for food for patients, and spending that money on diesel because of budgetary constraints caused by austerity measures.
‘Load shedding is utterly devastating in hospitals, and the government has not taken this issue seriously at all, which is why Haitu participated in the court case.’
- In a separate development, at least five people linked to Fort Hare University were allegedly kidnapped, violently assaulted and threatened recently, with the latest incident taking place last Sunday, after a Federation of Unions in South Africa (Fedusa) executive member was allegedly kidnapped from his East London home and tortured for seven hours.
Details about his violent kidnapping and torture were revealed during an urgent press briefing called by Fedusa in Johannesburg last Wednesday.
Other Fedusa executives who called the urgent briefing revealed that this latest incident was linked to a police investigation into a number of assassination plots at the university.
However SAPS spokesperson Brigadier Athlenda Mathe, commenting on the statement released by Fedusa last Thursday, said that every member was fully aware of the prohibition against torture and every member was trained to properly deal with a person in their custody and how to conduct an interview in a proper manner.
But Fedusa has alleged that it was members of the SAPS who were behind the latest string of kidnappings and torture of some of its members.
‘We can also confirm at this time that we have been in contact with the Director of Public Prosecutions in charge of investigating the issues at F.H. and have provided him with the evidence that we have accumulated in order to ensure that a proper and professional investigation into this most disturbing event takes place. It is also our intention to make representations to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate to investigate this matter urgently,’ Fedusa said.
According to Fedusa, last Sunday at around 7pm, approximately 12 heavily armed people identifying themselves as members of SAPS entered the home of the member, without producing an arrest warrant.
He was allegedly handcuffed, forced into a vehicle, blindfolded and driven to an undisclosed location where he was stripped naked, arms and legs bound behind his back and tortured.
Fedusa said he was beaten, forced into unnatural positions, smothered with a plastic bag ‘all the time being threatened with dire consequences as a result of the truthful answers he gave which were not to the liking of those torturing him.
‘Our member was forced to endure this physically painful and psychologically terrifying torture over a period of approximately seven hours,’ it said.
‘During the illegal interrogation/torture, it became apparent that the reason for the actions of the SAPS members was to extract information regarding recent assassination attempts at Fort Hare. Based on the questions asked, it became apparent that it was the SAPS members tasked with investigating this matter that were the perpetrators of this gross human rights abuse.
‘After this ordeal, our member was dropped off at home and threatened that if he speaks up, they will come back and he will be murdered,’ Fedusa said.
Due to his physical and mental condition at that time, his family had to rush him for emergency medical care in the early hours of the morning.
Fedusa said with the assistance of private security and investigative specialists, they had since managed to identify the SAPS members and collect many ‘promising’ leads from CCTV footage and cellphone video footage of the kidnapping, as well as the exact location where the torture took place.
These and other leads have been handed over to the relevant authorities to investigate.
- Nurses organisation DENOSA, issued the following statement:
‘The Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa (DENOSA) in Mpumalanga is horrified by the killing of two nurses, who are DENOSA members, and their brother by a policeman in Bushbuckridge on 1 May in another act of Gender-Based Violence + Femicide (GBV+F) in South Africa and we call for tough justice to be served on behalf of the three victims.
‘We call on the justice system to take note of this consistent phenomenon where the police are often the common denominator in the committing of a criminal act of GBV+F. Let a strong message be sent to the South African Police Service (SAPS) that it must get its house in order and address the glaring psychological trauma effects that many policemen seem to suffer from before many more women and community members fall victim to their guns.
‘The two nurses, Nomthandazo Mnisi and Colisile Mnisi, who are siblings together with their elderly brother, Dennis Mkhatshwa, were gunned down by the husband of the big sister nurse, Nomthandazo, following a quarrel with him, who is also a police officer. It is alleged that in the middle of the discussion by the two families over the issue of the frequent domestic violence between the couple, the policeman went to his bedroom and came back with his service pistol and shot randomly at the wife’s family members, killing the two sisters and their brother. He later handed himself over to the police. Nomthandazo and Colisile were working nurses at Marite Clinic and Matikwane Hospital respectively in Mkhuhlu.
‘As DENOSA, we are horrified and tired of these consistent acts of GBV+F on nurses in the country. The sad loss of three siblings by a single family, and two members of DENOSA in good standing, is too much to accept and is the most difficult disaster for their family to be consoled.
‘For the nursing profession and the community, the loss is equally deeper because the nurses have been lost at the time when the country is experiencing a serious shortage of nurses due to the low intake of students to study nursing at government colleges these days. And Mpumalanga only has one nursing college for the whole province.
‘The younger sibling had just assumed her job as a qualified nurse in April 2023 after her recent graduation. The impact that their absence will have on the nursing services to communities will be huge.
‘That these nurses were lost to a policeman, another public servant, who should actually be their protector, speaks so much about the psychological challenges that the many men in blue face which needs to be resolved as a matter of urgency.
‘Many nurses have perished in the hands of their police partners. The communities have just been deprived of two more nurses who were serving them at the time the 2020 joint Report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and International Council of Nurses (ICN) foresees the shortage of nurses globally reaching catastrophic levels by year 2030.
‘DENOSA calls for the court to deny bail to the perpetrator as one form of immediate justice to the family that has sustained a double grief.
‘The provincial gender structure of DENOSA in the province will lead the picketing by nurses for no bail when the perpetrator appears in court. The Gender structure will also spearhead the campaign calling on SAPS to address the psychological trauma suffered by the police, whose consequences, due to the nature of their work, often result in the victimisation of their women partners as well as members of the community.’