The DA in the Northern Cape says it will write to the Province’s MEC for Health to find out the reasons for the delay
Eight years after the commencement of the Port Nolloth Community Health Centre in the Northern Cape, the project is yet to be completed. This was revealed by the DA in the Northern Cape.
According to Dr Isak Fritz, the DA Spokesperson for Health in the Northern Cape, the facility could have played a meaningful role in the fight against Covid-19 in Namaqualand, if it was finished.
The DA oversight inspection at the facility this week revealed what the Party called ‘a little bit of progress’ since it lasted visited the facility in October 2019.
While I understand that lockdown threw a spanner in the works for all construction projects, the delay is not the result thereof. Construction had in fact ground to a halt just before lockdown, due to the non-payment of contractors.
According to Fritz, they will submit parliamentary questions to the new MEC of Health, Maruping Lekwene, to determine the reasons for the ongoing delays.
This is by no means the first time that the health department has held up projects due to its failure to efficiently process contractors’ invoices for varying reasons, including a lack of funds, inefficiencies and even mismanagement within the system. Regardless of the reasons for the hold up, they are unacceptable.
The project commenced in April 2012 and was supposed to have been completed two years and four months later, in August 2014. Non-stop hindrances have plagued this project which is already six years past its original scheduled due date.
The chronic delays have led to a massive escalation in costs and overspending on the projected budget. Given the fiscal difficulty which the country now finds itself in, this is a crisis in itself, as the reprioritisation of funds towards addressing the pandemic means that the department is likely to have less funds to complete and operationalise this facility.
Fritz said health care system in Springbok has been nearing collapse long before the additional burden of the Coronavirus. It is therefore the people of Namaqualand, where health services were already severely strained before the Coronavirus pandemic, who will suffer the most.
