The Northern Cape Department of Health is based in a refurbished Victorian home in central Kimberley. Inside, sitting at a boardroom table, health MEC Mase Manopole is speaking softly. Occasionally her voice rises, to stress a point.“I don’t like aircon,” she smiles, shrugging. “Normally I switch it on for guests, but I forgot. Sorry.”Somehow, we start the interview not with corruption, or the shortage of healthcare workers, but by discussing dietary choices.
Soon dubbed “the people’s premier”, Saul put his words into action, scrapping expenses like blue-light brigades and framed portraits of government officials in public buildings.Speaking inside the boardroom, she nods: “I’m okay with this. It is useless to have portraits of officials up everywhere, but they never leave the building. I go out all the time. To visit hospitals and clinics around the province, meeting with people face to face. And people do recognise me.
“The province is so big, reaching people is a challenge,” says Manopole. “We have to be creative in this, the special vastness of our province.”The Northern Cape’s key health challenges go hand in hand. Vast rural expanses, grinding poverty, plus resource and staff shortages. While they are trying to recruit a suitable full-time specialist, there are challenges. Manople notes: “A shrinking pool of obstetrician and gynaecology specialists in the public space, and the fact that most health professionals prefer to practice in South Africa’s larger cities.”
“It is cheaper than employing, for example, full-time nurses, because of their cost to company packages. We can appoint three session nurses for the price of one full-time nurse. So we have three bodies in a facility for the cost of one. I mean, yesterday in Upington, the hospital’s operational manager said to me ‘MEC, thank you for bringing in those two session nurses, they’ve made a huge difference’. These are creative solutions within the constraints of the department’s fiscal situation.
Funding remains an enduring headache. Commenting on the De Aar hospital, which has been vandalised with a TB ward that still hasn’t been opened, Manopole says: “Yes, I am aware of it – that it is not open. This I will present next week as well. We need funding to make this hospital operational.”Emblematic of the province’s corruption woes is the infamous Northern Cape Mental Health Hospital, which opened in Kimberley in 2019.
Manopole shakes her head and gestures. “Jonkers is not in this building,” she says. “He’s in the building next door. When all of that happened, he was at the department of transport.” Furthermore, she points out that she was not responsible for his appointment and that this falls under the jurisdiction of the premier.Manopole was born in 1971, the fifth of six children, to a teacher mother and entrepreneurial father, who owned a shop and a butchery.
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