President Cyril Ramaphosa should do the honourable thing and explain to South Africans why he signed the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act into law shortly before last year’s elections.
On 6 May this year, the North Gauteng High Court ruled, in the case involving the Board of Healthcare Funders and the SA Private Practitioners Forum, that the President should provide the record of his decision-making to enact and sign the legislation.
In terms of this ruling, the President needs to indicate whether all the legal requirements were met.
In response, the President applied for leave to appeal to the Constitutional Court.
The Freedom Front Plus (VF Plus) believes that President Ramaphosa signed the NHI Act just before the election solely to garner votes to save the ANC from political ruin. The fact that the President now wishes to appeal the High Court’s decision demonstrates that his conduct was not in the country’s best interests or to ensure South Africans’ health and well-being.
It begs the question: What is the President hiding?
Meanwhile, the Minister of Health has spent R9,6 million since October 2024 desperately defending the NHI in court with an inflated legal team consisting of five senior and seven junior advocates. It borders on utter absurdity.
There are currently seven cases against the NHI being heard in the country’s courts, with more to follow. All while medical malpractice claims amounting to approximately R75 billion are pending against the Department and R3 million per month is squandered on NHI advertisements. In addition, the Department faces a budget shortfall of R7,5 billion due to the withdrawal of USA’s PEPFAR and USAID funds.
What the President’s legal costs relating to the NHI case will eventually amount to is anyone’s guess.
One thing is sure, though, the funds are crucial for restoring and rebuilding the country’s public healthcare service. Instead, it is being squandered by a stubborn President and Minister of Health.
South Africa urgently needs doctors, nurses, medicine, medical equipment, hospitals and clinics, but funds are disappearing into the bottomless NHI pit.
Now is the time for the President to be honest and transparent with South Africans, halt the NHI in all its forms, return to the drawing board and, with the help of medical experts from both the public and private sectors, design a system that will benefit everyone in the country.
FF+ Manifesto on Border control: Strengthening border control.
Grinch Cheese
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Shamrock
Fun South African Fact: South Africa is home to the oldest meteor scar in the world – the Vredefort Dome in a town called Parys. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.