Extracting justice in this country can require a mixture of persistence, money and luck. Few among us can manage all three, and too many people do not enjoy the dignity afforded by the fair dispensation of justice.
The reasons for this are many and complex, but contrary to suburban prejudice, the quality of the people working in the courts is not the largest contributor to this knotty problem. It is rather that the cultural and socioeconomic conditions of our country create a wave of poverty, crime and violence that overwhelms the system, and that scarce skills, education and resources are sometimes misallocated.
Even in our brutalised society, some matters come before the courts that defy belief. Perhaps to illustrate our collective desensitisation, it is not just the harrowing details of what horrors befell the victims of the Life Esidimeni scandal that create a sense of injustice. It is not only the executive incompetence and corruption at the Gauteng department of health. It is the haughty indifference to the appalling plight of those desperately vulnerable people that stokes the fire of legitimate anger.
Qedani Mahlangu, the erstwhile Gauteng health MEC, has not yet had the grace to acknowledge the pain of the families of the 141 patients who died after being transferred out of a functioning and established healthcare facility to ill-equipped and under-resourced NGOs on her orders.
She has deferred, deflected, denied and dismissed all suggestions that the decision she took to do this in the face of desperate and repeated pleas from experts and families was callous and dangerous, and that she overrode then finance MEC Barbara Creecy’s advice that it was financially irrational. In her contempt for those who died and the families that loved them, Mahlangu has consistently sought to frustrate any sense of justice or closure they might have hoped to attain in the wake of this miserable affair.
Now, at last, an inquest under Pretoria high court judge Mmonoa Teffo into the deaths has in excruciating and devastating detail found Mahlangu and the department’s then head of mental health services Dr Makgabo Manamela can be held criminally liable for nine of the deaths. For the families of the other 132 patients this probably does not feel like justice, no matter the evident competence of the jurists involved in the inquest.
This outcome is nevertheless to be welcomed, and we hope the prosecution authorities consider the considerable pain and time that the families of the dead have already had to endure when planning their timetable for action.
For the rest of us, we need to take important lessons from this terrible story. First, the checks and balances in society are there for good reason. Mahlangu’s disdain for expert advice is just one feature of her conduct that is unforgivable.
Second, while we understand the concept that weak, disinterested or lazy people dropped into executive positions of authority to deliver critical public services cause harm, in the Life Esidimeni affair we can so clearly see the truth that services delivered by a competent civil service are a matter of life, death and basic human dignity.
On the pain of such a thing happening again, let us never forget it.
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