MONDAY, 2.30PM
PUBLIC Protector Selby Baqwa has found that Health Minister Nkosazana Zuma’s department made grossly exaggerated and misleading claims to Parliament earlier this year about the relative expense of medicines in South Africa.
However, Baqwa did not go as far as to make a finding of improper conduct, and noted that the profits of pharmaceutical companies in South Africa appear to be “sunstantial”.
The complaint to the public protector was lodged by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association of South Africa in June this year at the height of its battle with Zuma over her proposed legislation to lower drug prices. She used claims that South African prices were out of line with other countries to motivate formalisation of generic substitution and a controversial proposal to override patent rights in allowing imports of cheaper medicines.
The legislation, the Medicines and Related Substances Control Amendment Bill, cleared its final parliamentary hurdle last week when it was approved by the National Council of Provinces.
Baqwa said that, on Zuma’s own admission, information given by her department on prices and the use of generics had “sometimes not been as accurate as could be expected”. Given the special role it had to play in the crucial area of national health, the department should try to use correct data in all its public statements, he concluded.
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