Johannesburg - It was imprudent first for Gauteng Health MEC Dr Bandile Masuku to
conduct a press briefing at prospective gravesites with gravediggers in the background.
Why would an MEC for Health be talking about graves and making provisions to bury his constituency, thousands of whom have contracted Covid-19 but are still very much alive, while only a few are fighting for their lives in hospitals?
Burials are the domain of Joburg’s City Parks or the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs.
People whose job is the preservation of life and wellness don’t give media briefings at gravesites. Masuku’s priority as a Health MEC is saving lives, not digging graves.
From whatever angle that Masuku’s briefing could be considered, it signalled that a terminal point had been reached by Gauteng’s attempt to fight Covid-19.
Imagine what it would do to the mental state of patients, finding an assortment of coffins lined up at casualty wards? What has his press briefing, flighted on television, done to the morale of some of the people fighting Covid-19 in hospitals, at home and in quarantine sites?
Masuku’s failure to draw a clear line between savings lives and demonstrations about 24000 graves and a capacity for a million more for burials, has created panic and a perception that the Gauteng government has given up on the fight against the spread of Covid-19.
All this comes in the background to the public being been told the Covid-19 storm is coming, but that we are ready and prepared to deal with it.
After the first lockdown was declared in March, we were told
we had managed to flatten the
curve and bought ourselves time to build infrastructure and procure personal protective equipment to equip health-care workers to fight this battle.
But now when the Covid-19 storm that “we warned you about” arrived in Gauteng as Premier David Makhura intoned, instead of the Health MEC telling Gautengers
what to do and where to go to get help, he comes out on television next to a gravesite.
Should we deduce that the province has lost the fight already? Did they even have a fighting plan in the first place? The Gauteng province has acted without thought to the message it intended to communicate to the people.
Such conduct threatens to diminish the demonstrable best efforts that health establishments and leading health officials, in the person of Masuku himself, Makhura and Health Minister Zweli Mkhize are putting into the battle.
Mixed messages and plans that lack wisdom, as is the use of motorbikes as part of a response arsenal to fighting Covid-19 in the Eastern Cape, procurement mischief in securing products and services, outright embezzlement of money by using door-to-door awareness campaigns as a cover, and now the grave-digging spree by the Health MEC, are not good for the morale of this country that is buckling under the effects of the pandemic.
Granted this is all new to us, but could our leaders please come to their senses and show the mettle of true and courageous leadership when dealing with this pandemic?
If cool heads don’t prevail, then all we will have is panic and a hopelessness from our citizenry. And that state of mind is not good for our national psyche.