JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – A new video has emerged of South Africa’s health minister for Limpopo province railing at the Zimbabwe government for presiding over a failing health system.
Dr Phophi Ramathuba complains that President Emmerson Mnangagwa is “doing nothing” to provide quality health services for Zimbabweans and she is having to do his job.
She is proposing sending a bill every month to the Zimbabwe government for all patients treated in hospitals in her province.
A video of Ramathuba visiting a hospital in Bela Bela went viral recently after she was seen chastising a Zimbabwean patient for allegedly depleting her health budget. The patient had been involved in a car accident in Zimbabwe, and went to South Africa for treatment.
Ramathuba told that patient that “you should be with Mnangagwa.”
The Zimbabwe government, through its embassy in South Africa, sent a diplomatic protest to South Africa’s foreign affairs ministry saying it watched the video “with shock and disbelief.”
South African president Cyril Ramaphosa revisited the matter while answering questions in parliament on Tuesday. Ramaphosa insisted that Dr Ramathuba had “raised an important issue” but added: “Of course she raised it with a patient and I guess, it is such an important issue, it could have been raised in another way.”
In the latest video posted online on Wednesday, Dr Ramathuba is seen addressing a pregnant woman from Zimbabwe in a hospital in Mokopane. The woman is there for antenatal care, Dr Ramathuba discloses.
After learning that the woman was transported by the local ambulance service from another facility, Dr Ramathuba fumed: “For you, I must bill Mnangagwa because really I’m transporting you everytime to come here. What is Mnangagwa doing? He’s doing nothing and Phophi Ramathuba is doing his job.
“Mnangagwa is out of order. He must do his work. I’m going to bill him.”
Turning to one of her officials, Dr Ramathuba added: “Let’s really be serious, let’s cost all the hospitals and we send the bill (for foreign nationals) to their governments. All the deliveries in our hospitals, those that have left, we must send it to their governments and I will even issue a press statement that the Limpopo government has sent a bill of so many millions for this month for Zimbabwean nationals who cross the bridge come and deliver.”
Dr Ramathuba said she had noticed that some Zimbabwean patients came from Zimbabwe with cards indicating the place of delivery as South Africa.
“That’s what their nurses are writing. Zimbabweans are planning to give birth in South Africa because there’s nothing there. As midwives, we can’t turn away mothers and babies… they’re not the ones that made Mnangagwa president,” she added.
Health services in Zimbabwe’s public hospitals have collapsed owing to years of poor investment by the government. Nurses and doctors are leaving for foreign countries in their thousands.
Where professional health care is available in private hospitals, over 90 percent of Zimbabweans cannot afford the fees – forcing some to travel to South Africa which is currently facing rising anti-immigrant sentiment as pressure mounts on its social services.
