Fired deputy was a failure at her job, says minister

Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has come out guns blazing after her former deputy claims she was not allowed to do her job , writes TAMAR KAHN THE gloves came off on Friday as former deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala Msimang went public with diametrically opposed descriptions of her performance in her role, and the reasons for her sacking this week by President Thabo Mbeki. While Madlala-Routledge claimed she was undermined, threatened, and ultimately pushed out for “doing her job”, the minister strove to paint a picture of a recalcitrant deputy who fiddled on her cellphone in meetings, and failed to perform the duties assigned to her. Madlala-Routledge held a no-holds-barred press conference in Cape Town to expand on the terse statement Mbeki issued to the news services at four minutes past midnight on Thursday morning announcing her sacking. She began by saying Mbeki had asked her to resign on Tuesday for breaching government rules by travelling to Spain without presidential authorisation, and flouting procedure by visiting Frere Hospital in East London in the wake of a newspaper exposé on baby deaths in its maternity ward. In both instances, she claimed, she was simply fulfilling her duties. She went on to claim that her tenure as deputy health minister had been hamstrung by Tshaba-lala-Msimang, saying she had only been given room to manoeuvre during a brief hiatus when Transport Minister Jeff Radebe stood in for her ailing boss. Tshabalala-Msimang was admitted to hospital last October with a lung infection, and returned to work after a successful liver transplant in June. She said Tshabalala-Msimang had refused to authorise her to carry out duties delegated to her under the Constitution, and was only accorded these powers when her old struggle comrade Jeff Radebe was in charge. Radebe, who was her commander when she was an underground member of the previously banned South African Communist Party, “realised these delegations were meaningless without authority, and he signed”, she said. Those powers were revoked by Tshabalala-Msimang shortly before she was dismissed, she said. A visibly emotional Madlala-Routledge said she had been sidelined within the health department by director-general Thami Mseleku, who instructed senior officials not to liaise directly with the then-deputy minister. All information she requested from them was to be submitted to the minister, who would then decide whether to release it to her deputy. Madlala-Routledge also claimed she was threatened, and almost lost her job two years ago following a hard-hitting speech on the role of nutrition in HIV she gave to the National Council of Provinces. “The minister said to me ‘I will fix you’, and maybe she has fixed me (now),” she said. In stark contrast to Tshabalala-Msimang, Madlala-Routledge has spoken out against proponents of nutritional supplements who persuade HIV-positive patients not to take or discontinue antiretrovirals , and urged patients not to take remedies whose safety and efficacy is based solely on anecdotal evidence. She has also publicly lauded the AIDS lobby group the Treatment Action Campaign which has a tense history with the minister. Spokesman for the minister Sibane Mngadi flatly denied on Friday that she had ever threatened her former deputy, saying that Madlala-Routledge had never raised the alleged incident within government or party structures. In a hard-hitting rebuttal to Madlala-Routledge’s claims of being sidelined, he said she had consistently failed to attend high-level departmental meetings. “On the few occasions that she was present, she would mostly be attending to her mobile phone while the discussions were under way,” he said. Mngadi also said that Madlala-Routledge had dragged her heels performing tasks delegated by the minister upon her appointment in 2004. These included overseeing the transfer of state mortuaries from the South African Police Service to provincial health authorities, developing a health technology policy, overseeing health laboratory services, mental health services, and environmental health. “She didn’t deliver on the tasks she was given,” he said, citing as an example the fact that “we continually get complaints about laboratories and their slow turn around time.” Madlala-Routledge had also promised to deal with the plethora of fake slimming products on the market, but had failed to do so, he said. He said she had been granted full authority in the areas designated to her.