FOR A few minutes as former Gauteng health MEC Qedani Mahlangu was being grilled about her role in the Life Esidimeni tragedy in which 143 mentally ill patients died, a woman in the public gallery was fixated on her cellphone. Noxolo Gumede, 44, was browsing through an article in June 2013.
“Qedani Mahlangu’s actions come back to haunt her,” read the headline screaming out of Gumede’s cellphone screen.
It wasn’t about the Esidimeni catastrophe.
The Supreme Court of Appeal had ordered Mahlangu to reinstate members of the Gauteng Gambling Board she had dismissed after they defied her instruction to relocate to the department’s new offices in the Joburg city centre.
One line in the article seemed to heighten Gumede’s curiosity.
“I sense that you want to use every trick in the book not to move offices. May I suggest that you speed the process of moving before I lose my cool with you,” Mahlangu wrote in an email to the board’s then acting chief executive, Ndanduleni Makhari.
On Wednesday, there were echoes, or flashes in Mahlangu’s testimony at the Esidimeni Arbitration hearings into the deaths of 143 patients, of her disposition as the proverbial iron-fisted lady with fire raging in her belly during her testimony.
When senior officials dared express their concerns about the ill-fated decision to move the patients from Life Esidimeni facilities to unregistered and ill-equipped NGOs, her reaction seemed hostile: Implement the marathon project without delay or risk being summarily dismissed.
“Do you work for the Gauteng government or NGOs (who were opposing the relocations)?” she had warned in an email correspondence.
It wasn’t only the departmental officials who bore Mahlangu’s wrath.
When the officials sent her a letter from the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (Sadag) about the deaths of a patient at Precious Angels NGO in Tshwane and bodies piling up in a local morgue, Mahlangu allegedly wasted no time unleashing private lawyers on the organisation.
“Show leadership (and) get our legal team involved in this process. These NGOs are dishonest. Please treat this as urgent,” she wrote in an email correspondence copied to the legal team.
Yet, Dlamini expressed dismay at the evidence of former HOD in the department Dr Barney Selebano, former director of mental health services Makgabo Manamela and other officials who said they were scared of her.
“I don’t know why all of a sudden they (officials) would be scared of me... I know myself to be a very warm person,” Mahlangu said.
Her response was met with murmurs inside the giant marquee set up at eMoyeni house in Parktown, which was predominantly filled with the parents and relatives of the patients.
As the heckling grew louder, former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke, who is presiding over the hearings, chastised the unruly parents.
“Sikhathele nga manga, judge... (We are tired of lies, judge),” said a woman, in a protest to what she and others saw as Mahlangu’s blatant lies and evasiveness to the questions regarding her alleged role in the patients’ deaths.
The chorus of protestation did calm down but the quietude, when it returned, albeit momentarily, was more out of respect for a revered jurist.
It was just after 2.30pm after the lunch break, and for all his bawling directed at the unruly parents and relatives, Moseneke himself was struggling with his composure.
His tone, his glances, his shrugs and the pitch in his voice was of a man getting increasingly agitated about Mahlangu’s responses to either questions by civil society group Section 27’s counsel, advocate Adila Hassim, or himself.
When Mahlangu wasn’t stuttering and stumbling in her responses, she was playing victim, crying foul that she was the target of “media (that) always has an agenda”.
When she was not gasping for answers and seemed out of her depth, she was apportioning blame on her subordinates in the department. “The procurement process is a pure responsibility of the officials Politicians don’t get involved.
“Those are solely the responsibilities of government officials,” she said, when quizzed about whether the process to relocate the patients to NGOs was done through a tender process.
Astonishingly, she could not say if the money that was budgeted for the relocations was allocated to the NGOs or not.
But then, if you thought that was enough to show her apparent disdain to the families, there was more to Mahlangu’s nature.
When asked, for instance, what conditions the patients had died from, she responded imperiously: “I am not a medical practitioner and forensic expert.”
She continued in the same vein when asked about how she ignored repeated warnings that the relocations would lead to the culling of jobs.
“I am not a HR expert.”
As Mahlangu went along regaling the audience with denials of her alleged involvement in the death, she drove the parents and relatives to the edge.
Many seemed ready to snipe and sneer at her at the very first sign of a stumble or lying.
“Una manga lomuntu. Sifelwe la! (She’s lying! Our loved ones are dead!) The truth will set you free Qedani! What is this woman talking about?” were some of the retorts to Mahlangu’s meandering as she avoided giving straight answers to crucial questions.
Gumede, meanwhile, bit her lower lip and gesticulated in utter frustration.
When Mahlangu couldn’t explain why the cost saving measures she had cited as among the main reasons for moving the patients had actually led to costs escalating, Gumede snapped.
“Nonsense,” she remarked as she stood up and walked out of the marquee.
The “contradictions and inconsistencies”, as Moseneke put it, were too much to bear for Gumede.
The lunch break did nothing to calm Gumede’s nerves, and she repeatedly shook her head as Mahlangu walked out of the marquee flanked by three burly bodyguards.
“Imali yethu!” she had remarked, as Mahlangu, who was dressed in mourning attire, shuffled to her seat after the tea break.
Gumede revealed that she was once diagnosed with a mental health condition after she suffered depression at her workplace.
She was attending the Esidimeni hearings to show support to the families who lost their loved ones.
“A lot of people take us for granted... Qedani thought society didn’t care about mental health patients, and could do whatever she wanted with them,” Gumede said during the lunch break.
She said of Mahlangu’s testimony: “It gets to a point where it’s impossible to sit there and listen to all this nonsense. To me, it’s like she’s talking to people who were at Life Esidimeni, and have just recovered.
“So she’s undermining the families, and I see this as an attack on me as a person and as a citizen who supposedly has rights.”
According to Ames Dhai, director of the Steve Biko Centre for Bio-ethics at Wits University, Mahlangu clearly does not understand what was in the best interest of psychiatric patients.
“She doesn’t need a medical degree to actually know that She lacks absolutely any form of ethics, both personal and professional,” he said, speaking to 702 this week.
“In terms of our constitution there are certain fundamental rights, the right to access to health care but the right to dignity and the right to health, and she obviously infringed all of these.”
Mahlangu is not alone. The same haughtiness was on display about 30km away in Midrand, where Mahlangu’s counterpart in the national government, Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini, faced a roasting of her own for her role in the social grants payment debacle.
Almost inevitably, Dlamini was omnipresent in Parktown.
“uBathabile!” remarked a woman in the public gallery about Mahlangu’s repeated lying.
It was, perhaps, not by default that some of the relatives at the Esidimeni hearings drew comparisons between Mahlangu and Dlamini. Like Mahlangu, Dlamini’s testimony was fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies.
As the more Dlamini was found wanting in her bid to absolve herself from any liability for the costs arising from the Constitutional Court case, the more her testimony was characterised by the self-same evasiveness of “angiyazi (I don’t know)”.
Throughout her cross-examination, Dlamini avoided answering simple questions or admit to what seemed plain facts.
Instead, she played the blame game, wagging her fingers at former SA Social Security chief executive Thokozani Magwaza and director-general Zane Dangor.
It is not as if Dlamini and Mahlangu’s conduct is surprising. The two are among the government officials who typify the sheer disdain and contempt with which many politicians and public representatives treat the citizenry.
Their total disregard for the plight of the poor is no different to Mary Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” rants upon learning that the peasants had no bread.
But then again, to expect anything worthwhile from the likes of Dlamini is just wishful thinking.
Dlamini is a byword of some of the incompetents in President Jacob Zuma’s bloated cabinet appointed for their loyalty, not ability, who believe that the people they are supposed to serve are accountable to them. Their petulance at public hearings, not just embarrasses the government, but is a telling indictment of those who appointed them.
They, like Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane, Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane, indicate the inexorable regression of the ANC in government into “an institution alien to its constitutional and societal standing” and the toxic factional culture and the entrenchment of personality cults, as ANC member Gugu Ndima observed.
“The vulnerable in our society became more vulnerable, as they no longer respected leaders but feared them. They lived in constant fear of losing patronage, business, jobs or livelihoods if they didn’t worship the leadership of the ANC,” she writes in an article to be published in The Sunday Independent tomorrow.
“Arrogance superseded superior logic The past decade produced cadres who were untouchables, it normalised pedestrian thought, it drained out intellectual engagement and elevated some of the most prosaic cadres as public representatives, who embodied this era of hedonism, imprudent thought, greed and crass materialism.”