To honour Babita Deokaran, we must protect our whistle-blowers

WHILE millions of South Africans face unemployment, hunger and crumbling public services, billions of rand in public funds that could alleviate this suffering are lost to corruption.

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This rampant looting proceeds with no regard for the misery left behind.

Our Constitutional Court has rightly pronounced corruption as a "cancer that threatens our constitutional order" and "a scourge that must be rooted out of society".

There is no starker recent example of this cancer's devastating effects than the Special Investigative Unit's (SIU) interim report on the Gauteng Department of Health and Tembisa Hospital.

The report reveals that over R2 billion meant for essential healthcare services was plundered by politically-connected criminal syndicates, aided by public officials who received over R122 million for their complicity.

As one judge noted, these are "greedy and politically-connected officials within the public service whose past time is looting public funds".

While efforts are under way to recover some of these funds, the damage has been done.

This money could have upgraded dilapidated hospital infrastructure, hired and paid for healthcare workers, and purchased desperately-needed beds, ambulances, dialysis machines and medicines.

Instead, it funded luxury vehicles, properties in upmarket areas, and the lavish lifestyles of syndicate members and their political enablers.

The exposure of this grand theft is not solely the work of official investigators; it is primarily the heroic efforts of whistle-blowers like Babita Deokaran, who paid with her life, and the tenacity of investigative journal-

ists like News24's Jeff Wicks.

It was Wicks whose persistent reporting first uncovered the suspicious contracts at Tembisa Hospital, forcing the issue into the public eye and helping to trigger the formal SIU investigation.

One shudders to think how much longer the looting would have continued without their combined courage.