A Culture of Denial - Perceptions

In April I started a post which lay as a draft until now.

I pull it out now and dust it off, because the concerns expressed here by the press at a national level and myself at a local level have not gone away, but seem to be showing themselves in another way.

We have the worry of an Eastern Cape Hospital making the news for the shocking symptom (high infant death rate) of a poorly functioning health system troubled by a lack of accountability and concern. I suspect that since we all have seen how the health system is functioning and are worried about the apparent lack of performance management, it seems plausible and we are concerned.

But it soon turns out that the deputy minister is misguided (and later dismissed) the hospital superintendent a fraud (and later suspended) and the data wrong (whose head rolled for that)! Then we find that the data provided to refute the accusations was for April 2006 to March 2004 and there seems to be lots of equipment that arrived just in time for the ministers visit.

I'm not a journalist so don't try and put irrefutable proof on the table - its perceptions that count and in this case it doesn't seem that nice!

To me it looks likes the Government wants to deny the problems exist and have made it go away - but if the parallel to my story in the unpublished post is there, we run the risk of others not knowing there was a problem and failing in the same way - which could cost lives in this case.

This weeks Mail & Guardian editorial identifies the consequences of President Mbeki's denial of the AIDS pandemic. It then describes the Presidents apparent denial of a crime problem in South Africa.

This has real parallels to my observation that South African Enterprise Development Project (vegetable gardens, small bakeries, chicken rearing, food processors being the ones I know well) implementors have a very wasteful approach to implementing projects that are supposed to help the poor. They install their unresearched ideas, put up the sign & cut the ribbon, promote extravagantly, recognise the failure, try to fix it, fail because of a lack of capacity, start the next project & forget about the first failure.

The result is:

• because of the lack of capacity they can't identify the real error
• because of the desire to forget the failure they don't share
• because they don't share someone else does the same somewhere else

and we end up with failures everywhere although the impression is that we had succeses