It takes a long time to build a functioning health service, but a short time to destroy it. Rob Ferreira Hospital in Mpumalanga was once a hospital to be proud of. But an MEC, Sibongile Manana, believed that the hospital’€™s leadership had undermined her authority by allowing a rape support organisation that dispensed anti-retrovirals to operate from the hospital.

So she fired the hospital superintendent and another doctor for insubordination. Eight doctors ended up leaving the hospital as a result and, although this happened seven years ago, Rob Ferreira has never recovered.

Manguzi Hospital in the far north of KwaZulu-Natal is doing pretty well. It has 18 doctors, and it offers a relatively good service particularly for people with HIV, despite being in the fourth poorest health district (out of 53) in the country.

But Health MEC Peggy Nkonyeni has decided that the hospital is a hotbed of racism and anarchy ‘€“ mainly because one of the doctors, Dr Mark Blaylock, put her photograph in a dustbin while another, Dr Colin Pfaff, raised donor funds to buy extra ARVs for pregnant women.

KwaZulu-Natal has the worst health indicators in the country ‘€“ the highest HIV and TB rates and the lowest life expectancy. There is a worldwide shortage of doctors, and ours are courted by a variety of countries. The health department can ill-afford to alienate overburdened health workers over petty issues.

Yet Nkonyeni used her Budget speech and a number of subsequent media interviews to portray Blaylock as a racist.

In an attempt to prove her claim, she has taken two prominent professors, a surgeon, a pathologist and an urologist out of their workplaces for 10 days to examine ‘€œracism, ill treatment of staff and abuse of departmental facilities by Dr Blaylock and some doctors operating at some of our rural facilities’€.

Blaylock should not have thrown Nkonyeni’€™s photograph in the bin. He knows that and he has apologised.

But his one mistake in the heat of the moment ‘€“ sparked by the MEC’€™s remark that rural doctors were motivated by profit not caring — should be balanced against his many years’€™ service to the country’€™s poorest patients.

For over a decade, he has chosen to serve black patients at both Manguzi and Edendale Hospitals. That’€™s hardly the profile of a racist.

Certainly, the incidents that Nkonyeni has publicised from Blaylock’€™s private personnel file show that he can be volatile. He pushed a radiographer who had reported drunk for work. He broke a pharmacy window because the pharmacist had failed to order anaesthetic drugs and he had a patient on the operating table requiring an emergency operation.

But his triggers were the fact that his colleagues’€™ inefficiencies were compromising patient care, not racism.

If he had been a racist, he would not have cared that the black man on the operating table died because he couldn’€™t get the operation he needed; he wouldn’€™t have fought to get patients’€™ X-rays so he could diagnose what ailed them.

Ascribing racist motives to every action without evidence is in direct contravention of our Constitution and out of step with the non-racial legacy of the ANC.

Crying racism without any evidence is the tactic of a weak leader who cannot muster any other defence, so resorts to emotion.

It is also a classic decoy strategy to draw attention away from one’€™s own weaknesses. By attacking Blaylock in her Budget speech, Nkonyeni managed to deflect attention from the fact that her department had massively over-spent, thanks in large part to inadequate planning and poor allocation policies.

The ANC-inspired Freedom Charter recognised way back in 1955 that ‘€œSouth Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white’€. Our Constitution echoes this, saying that the country ‘€œbelongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity’€.

But something has happened to the ANC of Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. It is no longer an organisation that has non-racialism as a core principle. At the same time, the cult of the individual has gripped the organisation, particularly in the provinces where MECs’€™ images emblazon buses, billboards and newspaper adverts.

President Thabo Mbeki’€™s ANC effectively replaced non-racialism with black African nationalism. Instead of seeking common ground between all South Africans, Mbeki has frequently resorted to racial blame ‘€“ especially during election campaigns.

We are fast approaching next year’€™s election, and Nkonyeni’€™s growing assertiveness probably stems from the fact that she is firmly ensconced in Jacob Zuma’€™s winning camp.

But while Zuma is trying hard to show that he can reach beyond his traditional Zulu nationalist base and offer a more humane, inclusive approach to the development of South Africa, Nkonyeni’€™s attacks on Manguzi doctors have sown racial polarisation.

An until-now unknown organisation called Khanya Africa took the race issue even further when it issued a press statement via the health department.

‘€œOur people have stomached for a long time the behaviors of the so called rural doctors or health care professionals who use the hunger for health services by our people and in the process rob them of their freedom and their rights,’€ proclaimed Dr Bongani Nxumalo on behalf of Khanya.

‘€œOur colleagues may be doing an excellent job but  it cannot be done to the insult (sic) of our black people,’€ he continued.

Yet when I called Nxumalo, who is employed in a government hospital, he did not want to explain the statements attributed to him.

His logic-defying assertion that putting an MEC’€™s photo in a bin is an insult to all black people and thus robs them of their rights would sit well in Zanu-PF but it should have no place in the ANC.

Meanwhile, tensions at Manguzi itself are high and there is a risk that it assumes a racial face. Many of the doctors feel betrayed by the hospital manager, Sipho Vumase, who supplied the health department with information about Blaylock. Vumase will be leaving soon to take up a job at head office.

But who is looking after the interests of the ordinary patients in KwaZulu-Natal? Who will rein in Nkonyeni? So far, those who could are silent. That’€™s not surprising. Ex-MEC Manana is sitting comfortably in national Parliament while her province’€™s health system is in tatters.

Yet if the ANC continues to let its leaders launch into ill-advised, race-based attacks to the detriment of service delivery, we will never have a country envisaged by Tambo, who said that in an apartheid-free South Africa, young people ‘€œshall be taught to love their people of all races, to defend the equality of the peoples, to honour creative labour, to uphold the oneness of mankind and to hate untruth, obscurantism, immorality and avarice’€.