EFF STATEMENT ON GOVERNMENT VACCINE STORAGE AND DISTRIBUTION TENDER

Thursday, 28 January 2021

The EFF notes with dismay that the National Department of Health, under the Leadership of Minister Dr Zwelini Mkhize, has issued out a tender for the storage and distribution of the covid-19 vaccines. This is a perfect sign of incapacity and incompetence. Above all, a direct contradiction to the idea they created that government was ready to roll out the vaccines.

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, a responsible and proactive government should have known that, should a vaccine be discovered, it will need storage and distribution capabilities. Yet the ANC government, true to its utter incompetence, has done absolutely nothing to build internal capacity so as to responsibly ensure storage and smooth distribution of vaccines to all our people, in urban and rural areas.

On countless occasions, the EFF has warned of the collapse of the Public healthcare system. The fact that the NDoH insists on being a curative system and not build capacity to administer Primary healthcare, prevention and education as fundamentals for a functioning health system is yet another proof of collapse. In essence, they are outsourcing a responsibility that should be directly in charge of.

The EFF calls on the Minister of Health, Dr Zwelini Mkhize to devise a sustainable plan which will capacitate the already existing public healthcare facilities with the necessary instruments to administer the storage and distribution of the covid-19 vaccines. The time to obscure the public on the inefficiencies of the state by hiding behind the private sector needs to come to a permanent end. Otherwise, Public Healthcare Facilities will permanently be in need of the capacitation.

The EFF further calls on the Minister of Health to redirect the funds meant to sustain the profiteering nature of tenderpreneurship and build vaccine storage and distribution centers across the country. We also call on the renovation and maintenance of already existing facilities.

It is shameful enough that the NDoH has on numerous occasions during this pandemic found itself mired in tender scandals and corruption relating to PPE and other essentials in the healthcare sector, that have cost lives of healthcare workers and innocent people, so that a selected few can profiteer.

It is therefore clear that the only way to stop all the corruption related to the looting of state resources is the abolishment of tenders. Government should take advantage of the urgency needed to deal with the pandemic and built internal capacity which will bring long term benefits to the public healthcare system.

Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, 28 January 2021