Interns burn tyres at hospital gates to demand ‘promised’ permanent jobs

On Thursday, 27 June, hopeful interns at the Bheki Mlangeni District Hospital in Jabulani, Soweto, started burning tyres at the hospital gates to demand permanent jobs they say were promised to them. 

The aggrieved workers, wearing visible tags denoting their status as interns, told Daily Maverick that when Ward 46 councillor Dumisani Modladlaba had taken them to the hospital last year, he had promised that they would eventually be employed permanently. 

However, Modladlaba said the group of about a dozen workers did not have any business being at the hospital and that he had made it clear to them in May last year that they should stop going to the hospital.

“I wrote a letter as a councillor preventing them from going to the hospital. But they continued volunteering their services, and they are saying they are working,” Modladlaba said. 

He said that when the group joined the hospital around April last year, he and hospital management had agreed that they were volunteers. Modladlaba said the group was aware of this and that they would not get paid for their services. 

There is no doubt that the hospital has recognised the group because their official name tags state that they are attached to the hospital as interns. 

Noluvo Dwenene (36), one of the interns, said they had been working for many months without getting paid. 

For the better part of Thursday morning, organised labour, hospital management and Modladlaba were locked in a meeting to discuss the issues raised by the group. 

“The representative from the department met with the group … who [it] seems had an arrangement with the ward councillor who had introduced them to the hospital,”  Gauteng health department spokesperson Motalatale Modiba said. “They had some grievances in relation to the arrangement they had with the councillor, including allegations regarding apparently unfulfilled sort of commitments or promises…”

On emerging from the meeting with hospital management, Gauteng health department representative Julius Maputla told the small crowd at the hospital gates: “The department doesn’t know you. Only the hospital knows you. You were brought here on the promise that you would get work. But no one owns up to you now.” 

The workers responded with anger, accusing Modladlaba of corruption. 

Maputla downplayed the allegations against the councillor and said his task was to understand the status of the group at the hospital. 

Speaking to Daily Maverick outside the hospital gates while the meeting was going on, the interns said the councillor, together with his friends in the South African Police Service and elsewhere, had constantly tried to push them out of the hospital

They told Daily Maverick that corruption was at the centre of the move to oust them from the hospital. 

“He has hired eight guards of his who now work at the security gates,” one of the interns said. 

Protection order

Police clean up rubble at the entrance to the Bheki Mlangeni District Hospital. (Photo: Bheki Simelane)