The contents of a recent report by the nonprofit organisation Open Secrets, titled Who Owns South Africa?, have been niggling at my conscience.
This is because of the normalisation of extreme wealth, which in order to exist often comes at great cost to people on the opposite end of the spectrum, who quite literally have less than nothing. And so the question nags: how do we accept that some have it all – and more – while others have less than nothing?
The report zeroes in on those profiteering from the commodification of health – local businesses as well as international ones. This is downright crass and criminal, as it means that a monopoly of people is making money from the sickness of others.
“It is notable that several of the large institutional shareholders operate outside South Africa,” the Open Secrets report further states. “This means that a substantial portion of dividends paid by private hospital groups also leaves the country to benefit wealthy investors based elsewhere.”
The passage highlights the extractive nature of making this money – it is not being reinvested in the country to circulate and create benefits in our economy.
Curiously, given the scale and impact of what it reveals, little note has been made of the report in the media or elsewhere.
A few weeks after its release, the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) released its own report on investigations into corruption at Tembisa Hospital. The story has been unfolding in various episodes on our screens, demonstrating again the callousness of amassing riches that are drenched in the blood of medical patients.
What makes these reports even more stomach-churning is that health, whether physical or mental, is the ultimate human frailty. It is our greatest vulnerability. Without it we quite literally die, and so it could only be the morally bankrupt who invest in deliberately profiteering from it.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights gives context and meaning to the right to health when it says: “As human beings, our health and the health of those we care about is a matter of daily concern. Regardless of our age, gender, socioeconomic or ethnic background, we consider our health to be our most basic and essential asset.
“The right to health is a fundamental part of our human rights and of our understanding of a life in dignity.
“The right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, to give it its full name, is not new. Internationally, it was first articulated in the 1946 constitution of the World Health Organization, whose preamble defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.”
In South Africa, section 27 of the Constitution provides that everyone has the right to have access to healthcare services.
What the Open Secrets and SIU reports reveal speaks to a central part of the right to health, namely the issue of dignity – and the indignity of being denied the right to wellbeing so that someone can gain financially. At its heart, this is ethically flawed.
I do not think that we are incensed enough about it. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
