The revelations of gross mistreatment have shocked South Africans and raised troubling questions about the government’s commitment to its most vulnerable citizens more than 20 years after the end of apartheid.
“This is the biggest mass death since democracy,” said Sasha Stevenson, an attorney with Section 27, a public interest law center that represented Mangena and more than 60 other patients’ family members. “This is a huge system failure.”
For reasons that remain unclear, the government made the transfers between October 2015 and June 2016 in a rushed process that family members and Life Esidimeni staff have repeatedly described as “chaotic.”
Some patients were tied up with bed sheets and loaded into trucks or were relocated without their identification or medical records. Others were moved multiple times between facilities. A health ombudsman’s report released in February 2017 called the process “negligent and reckless and showed a total lack of respect for human dignity.”
Conditions at some facilities were abysmal. Many patients were not given sufficient water and food, regular baths or appropriate medication. Many of the centers were overcrowded; in some cases severely ill patients were left to sleep on benches or the floor.
The incompetence was fatal. Most of the deaths occurred in five facilities, including Takalani.
The arbitration hearings into the tragedy were nationally televised and the hearings were a harrowing account of what the patients endured.