We must be a very sick society if preying on hospital patients becomes just another routine manner for hustlers to make money. This week we spent time in the Free State where health facilities are on the verge of collapse because they are being stripped bare by vandals out to make a quick buck.
The target of these shameless looters is the copper that taps are made out of. Sold for scrap, they apparently sell at a premium.
Ordinarily, this would have just been a criminal act worthy of the harshest condemnation and swift police action. But what makes it even more lamentable is that after the looting, patients are left without water, a basic amenity at the core of every health facility.
Water, like oxygen, is the lifeblood of a hospital or clinic. Other than being used for ablutions, water is as intrinsic to healthcare as blood is to sustain life.
In the depraved minds of these criminal syndicates, the hospitals and clinics serving their own communities are sites for plunder.
Many of the people depend on government-run hospitals and do not have the financial means to afford private healthcare.
Cutting off water supply in the hospitals they depend on is as good as killing them. One of the health pro-fessionals quoted in our story rightly points out that the vandalism is tantamount to murder.
Conjure, with your mind’s eye, the absurdity of family and friends carrying buckets of water to the hospital for their loved ones who are placed at such peril by vandals.
It is not normal. Not in any society. Not under any circumstances.
You’d think that such a situation would have spurred the authorities to action. Not in the Free State, where the quickest attention to this life-and-death situation is carried out at a snail’s pace.
It is not one hospital. Not one clinic. The situation obtains at several health facilities in the province.
This is a dire situation that needs concomitant police action to throw the book at the criminals.
Getting comment from the powers that be has been akin to sucking blood from a stone. We were asking about a problem on their door-step, something they are aware of but, alas, finding out if they had any plans to curb this criminal conduct proved to be easier said than done.
We remain none the wiser, as do the patients at the affected hospitals who have no idea when their crucial bath to offset further infection and disease will happen.
The Free State ranks among the poorest provinces in the country, beset with a myriad governance challenges and municipal crises. It is heartless to then to take from people who virtually have nothing to give. Stealing from people in hospitals must be among the most vile acts to inflict upon the incapacitated.
It is not easy to predict how the province will return to good health . We can only hope the authorities will move quickly to halt the rot.