The thing is, that no matter how much you may try to keep up appearances, people will try to find a crack, a flaw, something to talk about, something to point fingers at.
So why bother? Let's all make our bank statements public, let's publish our credit card bills and let everyone see that, as they suspected all along, we can't actually afford the car we drive, the watch we're wearing or the holidays we go on.
Or maybe... we can actually afford all those things. AND in fact, what we spend our money on is entirely our own business! And people who have time to talk about what others spend their money on, obviously don't have enough money of their own to keep themselves occupied!
But I digress; distracted, obviously, by idle gossipers. What I really wanted to comment on is the keeping up of appearances in the health department. KZN in particular, SA in general. It seems, unfortunately, that in this democracy we want to run in fancy shoes before we have learned to crawl on our hands and knees. What we seem to forget is that we can't be good at Calculus if we don't understand simple arithmetic.
This week Prince Mshiyeni Hospital in Umlazi, acquired a fancy new machine for the diagnosis of tuberculosis. This, of course, makes me very happy. TB is a real and devastating problem in SA and a huge burden on the health system.
The Minister of Health was at the hospital yesterday to visit and probably take some pictures... with the new machine.
What I'd like to ask though, is this: How come we have money for a fancy machine to diagnose TB, which probably cost millions (I'm guessing here, I welcome correction) but we sometimes run out of drugs to treat the TB? And, why can we not employ more people to provide proper treatment for TB?
We tell mothers that they have the choice not to breastfeed if they're HIV positive and will be provided with formula for 6months, but then the clinic runs out of formula and the mother can't afford to buy it herself.
We buy expensive ventilators for hospitals, but there is no cartridge for the blood gas machine, so it's impossible to ventilate anyone who needs it, because we can't monitor them appropriately.
We buy expensive CT scan machines, but we don't have money to employ someone who knows how to use it and interpret the pictures it takes.
Why is it that when elections are approaching, we strategically have pictures in the news showing expensive new TB diagnostic machinery at a busy hospital in a huge township with a huge voting population? And what happens when gloves run out at the hospital? And what about the child who dies from bed sores because the nurses are overworked and unable to provide proper care, because posts are frozen due to lack of funds?
But don't worry about that child, I'm sure his family couldn't afford him anyway. Rather take a picture for the newspaper: two big shots shaking hands in front of a shiny new machine, keeping up appearances.
