Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane has finally told us what we knew all along – the province’s healthcare system “has been overwhelmed” by the surge in Covid-19 infections. He further urges national government to bring in the army to beef up the province’s crippled and almost dysfunctional public healthcare system.  

However, deploying the army is not likely to be a lasting or even the best solution. It can prove costly and inadequate, especially if other provinces also begin to make similar requests. Why can’t government recruit our unemployed graduates and matriculants as healthcare, and teaching assistants in the Eastern Cape health and education systems?  

Of course, that the Eastern Cape public health is overwhelmed does not come as any surprise to the majority of citizens in the province. Almost every citizen who has encountered the system over the past five decades would concur that the system was never ready for a pandemic of any scale. In most rural healthcare centres – where these even exist at all – there have been serious staff and equipment shortages for decades.

Distressing as the situation might be, it should all make some kind of sense when one considers that this is the very province that incorporated two very impoverished and largely neglected former homelands (Transkei and Ciskei) in 1994. Since then, it has suffered from decades of infrastructure neglect, corruption, and rapacious looting of public funds and resources by the political and business elite. As such, the Eastern Cape is in an extremely precarious position as it confronts the current peak in Covid-19 infections and deaths. The province is extremely poor. Unemployment is high. The Eastern Cape provincial leadership is floundering and seems to be out of new ideas on how to fight this pandemic.

Recently, the health ministry in the province controversially spent R10.1-million purchasing 100 “ambulance” motorbikes, apparently for transporting Covid-19 patients. It is difficult to imagine just how these bikes will transport sick people for long trips to healthcare facilities on almost impossible rural roads where even buses (with much larger wheels) struggle to finish a safe trip in a day. 

…A few weeks of primarily practical training may be all that is needed. The stipends that the young people will receive could go a long way in supplementing the precarious livelihoods in many households in the province.

Some major healthcare centres in the cities are in total disarray and chaos due to poor management and derisory working conditions for medical, and support staff. Several schools have also shut down as more educators and learners are testing positive. No wonder the premier is calling for the army.    

However, in our army of unemployed youth can lie our first source of hope. Like in other provinces, there are thousands of unemployed graduates and young people with matric certificates in the Eastern Cape. Why not turn the challenge of youth unemployment into an opportunity in the fight against Covid-19?

The army should be kept at bay, especially considering its contested role during Covid-19. I propose that government urgently consider hiring unemployed young graduates (and those with a matric certificate), as healthcare and educator assistants in healthcare centres, and schools. 

Having healthcare assistants could provide much-needed reinforcement in hospitals and clinic non-specialised (but very demanding), tasks such as taking temperature and doing blood pressure tests, feeding patients who are unable to eat on their own, and administering medication. Our professional healthcare workers on the frontlines are being stretched too thin. Those who remain behind when their colleagues fall sick or contract Covid-19 are often compelled to carry a higher workload.

Healthcare assistants could be paid a monthly stipend of around R5,000. Each assistant can work for three days per week. Just imagine, with the R10-million that the Eastern Cape Health Department used to purchase motorbikes, they could provide jobs for 2,000 young graduates for a month at a R5,000 stipend for each of them. For R40-million, you can keep them in the system for four months. In a province where “more than 6,000 vacancies existed… before the pandemic began”, assistants, although not a permanent solution, could bring support to the system in this time of need.

Of course, they will need basic training. A few weeks of primarily practical training may be all that is needed. The stipends that the young people will receive could go a long way in supplementing the precarious livelihoods in many households in the province. The education department in the province could adopt a similar model as the Western Cape provincial department of education is already recruiting teaching assistants.

If national and provincial governments fail to take drastic action to handle the spread of Covid-19, this pandemic will completely ravage the Eastern Cape’s population. DM