The cost of incompetence, maladministration and corruption

ATHOL Fugard, the acclaimed South Africa playwright, was born in the Eastern Cape and grew up in Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth). Not surprisingly, some of his best works are set in and around this city.

One of his plays, The Blood Knot, is set in Korsten, an impoverished, so-called coloured area.

Written in 1961, it tells the story of two brothers, Morris and Zachariah, who share a home that is essentially a shack.

Their mother is black but they have different fathers. Morris has lighter skin than Zachariah and can pass for white.

Zachariah starts writing to a white girl and dreams of having a relationship with her, but Morris discourages the blossoming romance, aware that in apartheid South Africa such relationships are illegal.

Things take a turn when the young lady decides to visit Gqeberha and asks to meet Zachariah.

The brothers realise that she will be angry once she finds out she has been lied to and that the man she has been writing to is black.

So, they decide that fair-skinned Morris will pretend to be Zachariah.

Morris buys new clothes with the money he and his brother were saving. But as soon as he puts on the new clothes, he begins to act like a white person.

He also begins to view his brother as inferior even though they share a blood relationship.

A few years before Fugard wrote The Blood Knot, Livingstone Hospital was opened in Korsten. Today it is one of three tertiary hospitals in the Eastern Cape serving about 2.5 million people.

But the hospital is on the verge of collapse.

Two years ago, suspended Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane and her deputy released a report on the state of hospitals in the Eastern Cape, including Livingstone Hospital. She found the Department of Health in the province was not doing the job that was expected of them.

A few weeks ago, health workers at the hospital went on strike for higher wages. They used hand sanitisers to set tyres alight.

Protesters said the hospital was dysfunctional and some staff had not received new uniforms for more than a decade. Medicines were in short supply and some equipment was not working.

This week came the news that the hospital was turning away patients because there were no implants (metal devices) that were needed to treat broken and deformed bones.

Patients were given a letter with three contact numbers: one for the hospital’s complaint line, a second for the Eastern Cape Department of Health’s complaint line and a third for the presidential hotline.

The sad reality is that in the six decades since Fugard wrote the Blood Knot, nothing much has changed in Korsten.

Back then all it took for a brother to turn on a brother was skin colour. Today, it’s money. But incompetence, maladministration and corruption don’t just break hearts. They end lives.