Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa

Media statement  

Thursday, 29 October 2020  

The Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa (DENOSA) notes without any surprise the usually provocative and undermining Mid-Term Budget Policy Statement as delivered by Finance Minister Tito Mboweni yesterday in which he essentially said government will reduce drastically its services to communities, including essential services like healthcare.    

DENOSA demands that it be both ministers of Finance and of Public Service and Administration (Tito Mboweni and Senzo Mchunu) who must go out there and tell communities that they will get even lower services in future than what they have been getting, because the community anger over mediocre government services due to staff shortage in facilities is often taken out to the public servants like nurses. 

Nurses are getting attacked and abused every single day in our healthcare facilities over long queues and slow pace of services because both these ministers are not hiring staff that will help push the queue. Patients in public clinics must wake up at 02h00 in the morning to hold the queue and brave the cold weather and risk their lives just to be on time to get help by 07h00, but many end up returning back home without getting help due to few staff members who cannot take all of them! 

With regards to allocation of funds for hospitals, DENOSA is not going to compliment a fish for swimming because in the first instance it is the government’s job to do so, just as it is government’s job to pay its employees what has been agreed to. What is glaring, however, is the government’s lack of commitment to pursue NHI and this is a shame. The mini budget showed no commitment to even keep the fewer healthcare workers who were added during the COVID-19 pandemic. So after their contracts expire, the horrible healthcare services in facilities will get back to the past and things will get worse. 

Both the ministers are continuing to spit in the face of the public servants, many of whom held the nation high from jaws of COVID-19. All we hear from Minister Tito are endless bailouts of state-owned entities whose fall was self-made in the first place! This is not to say we oppose the bailouts to key strategic state assets, but we say the public servants are equally important as they drive government service to the needy communities.    

Frankly, as a nurses’ organisation, we are tired of explaining government’s failure to render quality healthcare services to communities because that only worsens the tensions between nurses and community members in our facilities.   

As he announced government’s so-called ‘commitment’ to manage expenditure, he took a usually cheap line of focusing on what has long been termed as ‘bloated public wage bill’ and announced the future cuts on public servants’ salaries and performance bonuses. 

Again, the minister picks up a fight with unions when he says there won’t be any salary increase in the next three years. Maybe Mboweni thinks he owns the collective bargaining platform in the public sector, and that he thinks he can dictate what happens to remuneration and conditions of service for government workers outside of it. He is mistaken. 

Not only is he naively compromising government by undermining collective bargaining agreements as shown by the matter that is in the Labour Court, but he lies also that government is meeting public sector unions with the view, essentially, to making them to accept that government can’t pay salary adjustments. Well, it is not the problem of public servants that government chooses to pay corruption. It must pay public servants, and DENOSA is fully committed to challenge government’s failure to adjust the salaries of nurses when the Labour Court looks at this matter in court on 2 December. 

End 

Issued by the Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa (DENOSA) 

For more information, contact: 

Cassim Lekhoathi, DENOSA Acting General Secretary 

Cell: 082 328 9671 

Simon Hlungwani, DENOSA President

Cell: 082 328 9635 

Tel: 012 343 2315 

Website: www.denosa.org.za

Facebook: DENOSA National Page 

Twitter: @DENOSAORG