War. That’s the fighting talk coming from Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande as he uses the intense media spotlight on the ANC’s National Health Initiative (NHI) to rabble rouse in his role as SACP general secretary.
Making capitalism the enemy
Speaking at the SACP’s 88th birthday in Virginia, the Free State, he promised to take the war against anyone who opposes the NHI to the streets. His speech makes agents of the media and the free market the enemy, and calls on communist cadres to declare war on capitalists that oppose the proposed health system: “The capitalist classes have already started a huge campaign in the media to try to discredit this system and we want to say to them as communists today, war unto you. Prepare for a huge battle because we are going to mobilise the workers and the poor of the country to fight against you so we can have a national health insurance scheme.”
The NHI has long been part of Nzimande’s artillery of populist pitches. The FM reports that in April before the election, Nzimande scaled the stairs of the Cape Town city council to address supporters after a protest march, saying of the NHI: “This means you will be able to go to any doctor or private hospital without having to pay anything.”
Without going into the problems or politics of the NHI, Nzimande’s approach of promising much should offer a telling insight to those who aspire to being good or great leaders. At a time when service delivery protests spark across the country, Nzimande’s war talk and divisive rhetoric serves the obvious political ambitions of an alliance rather than the constituency that alliance purports to serve.
Nzimande lives large
A fact that becomes increasingly obvious when one considers (as the Mail&Guardian reports) that the Communist Party’s Nzimande lives in the leafy suburbs of Emmarentia, owns up to four luxury vehicles, swans around town in a Jeep Grand Cherokee and earns between R700 000 and R800 000 a year.
While Nzimande’s self-serving communist propaganda may sound alien to business leaders, politics and self-interest is too often a divisive affliction found in industry. Typically these “leaders” and middle managers are found in organisations that put shareholder needs above all else, which glorify greed and acquisition, and propagate an ideology of fractious competition.
True leadership is contribution
Real leadership is, of course, all about service and contribution. That’s the first point that Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu makes in an interview on leadership with The Nobel Foundation. Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Laureate, says: “Ultimately, you want a leader who is also a servant. A leader is a leader because he is a servant. If you look at some of the greatest leaders like Nelson Mandela, he is not in it for his own aggrandisement. The great leader will show just how he or she is a leader for the sake of the land, by suffering. You are not seeking self-glorification or to feather your nest. You will see a great characteristic is that they are doing something sacrificial for those they are serving.”
Like Tutu says, leaders don’t create great expectations for their own benefit. Real leaders deliver greatly on the expectations of others for the benefit of those who put them in power.
It just shows you that the remaining GUCCI COMMUNISTS are a bunch of useless rabble rousers. If I & the rest or the majority stop paying for medical aid (different scenarios could be put in place) who would be paying for this fool & his followers?
Our caviar comrades are in a ‘class’ of their own, if I may use the pun. The rest of the world has long since known that the emperor has no clothes, but our socialists use language as quaint and anachronistic as the Nuremberg party rally of 1937. As Mrs Thatcher once said, ‘socialists carry on until they run out of other peoples’ money to spend …’
Even in 1st world countries that have a tax paying base of 70% – 80% of the population as opposed to 14% or so in SA, like Aus and some western European countries have problematic health care. So in the UK Netcare help try and reduce the waiting time for operations down from 18 months.
Please Blade can the govt demonstrate the ability to run just a few of our existing hospitals effectively before destroying the private sector.
And your efforts should be in trying to improve the disgustingly low performance in many of the former township high schools – that is your job now Blade.
If we had 90% employment(like most of the west even in the recession) 90% of the population would be on medical aid, and the state would only have to provide for 10%. And the reason for jobless growth ????
Was “Liberation before Education” only for the poor, not for the elite?
Do Blunt Blade and his cohorts really believe that people will willingly allow such a blatant grag for private money. Why would anyone remain a member of a medical fund when all of us have been promised equitable care whether on or off a fund or employed or not.Such stupidity is beyound belief. Anyway there are always the overseas private funds like BUPA for those that can afford them.
Blade’s a chardonnay-socialist. A typical nomenklatura Stalinist throwback. Yearns for a dacha on the Black Sea.
@Klaus: Go spend a night at Helen Joseph or Baragwanath’s emergency ward and then come back and say that with conviction.
@Mark: I wouldn’t say our leadership are socialists. Rather that they are ardent capitalists who over promise, under deliver and enjoy spending other people’s money.That said, despite everything, we’re in a hell of a better place now that Mbeki is collecting dust.
@Paddy: You are right in saying this hasn’t proved 100% effective in European countries with a more palatable gini coefficient. What’s disturbing is not the plan itself, rather how badly it’s been thought through. We will however have to address social mechanisms for closing the poverty divide. If we don’t, there will be civil war.
@Lyndall: I think you can’t just glorify the West as the panacea to all the problems faced by emerging economies. We need to innovate and find our own solutions to the problems we face. Besides even in countries like Canada the public health system is a mess.
@k morrow: That we need a better public health system is without question. That higher earners will need to contribute more is unquestioned. We just need a system that works and has been well considered from a risk, behaviour, actuarial and other perspective. Not a knee jerk political response.
It is a tragedy that Blade has Zuma`s ear!
@Jon: A chardonnay-socialist. Ha – that’s priceless.
Blade Nzimande is at his intellectual best when he has an identifiable enemy to argue against, if not he creates one; he is utterly hopeless when he has to formulate something, anything, from scratch. Since he is not as media savvy as the great Tokyo (and he has the cunning ability to con almost everyone, that he is better than sliced bread), he uses the “poor” and the “working class” as his baton to fight his war (to become president one day). Instead of engaging opposing views he trains his barrels on “dissenting” views. In fact, not a lot of people disagree with a universal health plan; but more are concerned about its funding model, the current state of our health system and human resource capacity.
@Klaus,
“If I & the rest or the majority stop paying for medical aid[...]”
Klaus, the central thrust of the NHI is to deny you this option.
All will be compelled via tax mechanisms to make their ‘contribution’… ‘according to to their ability’, to a socialized health scheme run by the state.
All will then receive ‘according to their need’, or so the maxim goes.
“This means you will be able to go to any doctor or private hospital without having to pay anything” is not rhetoric contrary to the
‘constituency of the alliance’, it is insanity.
In one fell swoop, Blade will simply abolish the economic principal of scarcity, ushering in a land of plenty by a decree boomed out from the heavens.
The idea is to ‘socialize’ (steal) existing capital assets of private healthcare and throw them into the collective pot.
State bureaucracy is notorious at missing the pot, besides which, the public sector is a net consumer of capital.
As Blade says, we can’t have anyone ‘profiting’ from peoples illness, so this capital will eventually be consumed and lost.
Our privately funded pensions are next.
Mandy
My question is actually for Blade, who fell into a classic Freudian Slip.
If public management of services is so desirable and effective, why the itch to gain access to “any doctor or private hospital” without payment, rather than availing themselves of facilities provided by the State?
[ha ha ha !!!]
Given the vast numbers of poor who are in need of adequate healthcare (as if such a ‘standard’ exists outside arbitrary bureaucratic invention) in relation to the “higher earners”, what do you think is a fair marginal tax rate upon high earners which would at the same time realise such a provision?
In the real world, given the scale of need, 100% would be neither fair nor adequate.
In reality the SUPPLY of available care needs to grow dramatically, and this cannot occur unless the undertaking is profitable.
The smaller the margin, the slower the possible growth, (as their is less capital to reinvest) however ‘socially responsible’ the management and financially modest their own lifestyles.
The only other alternative is to sustain a non profit service by poaching from another area of the economy which IS profitable.
Businesses grow big by providing LOTS of goods and services to the masses, and reinvesting profits in growth.
Fatcats and shareholders who keep and spend profits on lavish lifestyles go out of business. (unless constantly ‘re empowered’ with other peoples money!)
Growth and prosperity without profit is a socialist myth.
Mandy
“To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities”.
Means that those with the abilities emigrate and those with the needs remain. Which is why Africa loses 70,000 graduates a year. Now our doctors will join them.
Which is not “glorifying the west” but mocking communism.
Mandy,
Maybe do a few sums before saying the “rich” must contribute more. How much must they contribute to provide free national health for all? Personally I do not think it can even be started let alone sustained; at least in any useful form. There is simply not the money to implement or the ability to administer such a system. Cynically I reckon most of the money will not even get past the deployed cadres in admin. Like education, etc etc.
@Lyndall: Your quote refers: “If we had 90% employment(like most of the west even in the recession) 90% of the population would be on medical aid, and the state would only have to provide for 10%. And the reason for jobless growth ????” I would say that’s glorifying the west with unsubstantiated data. Where’d you get your figures from? Been to the states lately? It’s a bit of a mess.
@Sid: The maths shows that unemployment, poverty coupled with a mass influx from other African problems show that there is a huge strain on our social systems. Money will have to come from somewhere to try resolve this. The stronger will have to support more. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not.
He is a blunt blade, that why he relies on others to do the political cutting for him!. GA!!
Oh Mandy,
“Money will have to came from somewhere” Why? and, “the stronger will have to support more” How? Only the scheming who will avoid taxation by all sorts of means, the stupid, who won’t be your “strong” and the poor will remain. It’s Zim all over again but now with SA’s particular brand of incompetence thrown in. I propose the opposite. Turn state health over to the private by open (no BEE, etc etc) tender with competent govt officials to measure performance.
For the NHI to succeed, the rich have to tolerate being over-taxed and disenfranchised in choosing their health care providers. People with means can always move. Also, the specialist doctors are extremely highly skilled professionals. They can very easily emigrate. The failure of the doctor’s OSD to adequately address working conditions and salaries has already lead to an upswing in council applications for CGSs (certificates of good standing)…which is an indirect indication of doctors applying for foreign registration.
So the solution really is to stay healthy, and pray for a sudden painless death!
How long will it take for the SACP and the ANC to destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs. At the current rate I would say not more than 6 – 10 years .