Privatise medical stores – Haufiku

JEMIMA BEUKES

Health minister Bernard Haufiku has set the ball rolling to outsource the management of the country’s Central Medical Stores (CMS) to the private sector, in a bid to improve the ailing state facility.

He says this move will save the government N$100 million per year.

The minister made it clear yesterday that the ministry’s core function is treating patients and not the CMS, whose poor performance has negatively affected the ministry.

Asked what alternative plans he has if government shoots down his privatisation plan, Haufiku said he would just have to keep quiet.

“I have no power. No matter how convincing I am. That is just the nature of government; there is a hierarchy there. You are a minister, there is a prime minister and there is a president; no matter how convincing you are that scientifically it makes sense.

“If the PM and president say ‘no’, there is nothing you can do, the best is maybe to leave the government if you want to leave, but that is not what I am planning now,” Haufiku said.

Speaking during a Society for Family Health (SFH) breakfast meeting yesterday, Haufiku emphasised that the ministry would not be able to run effectively for the next 15 years because it simply did not have the capacity.

“I am adamant the Central Medical Stores with all the stores also in (Windhoek), Rundu and Oshakati must go to the private sector, any capable private sector, and we give them a budget and tell them this is what we need. It is not a core function; the ministry must concentrate on treating patients,” said Haufiku.

He said the ministry was still losing mothers and babies, as it was struggling to equip health facilities with basic equipment such as ultrasound machines.

“The Central Medical Stores are still here; sometimes there is medicine, sometimes there is not. Some people go to work and get their pay cheque. We are now busy transforming it.

“We will not be able to run that thing; we need to give it to the private sector. People do not like it when you tell the truth.

“And we have done the remodelling, we had a consultant who told us and demonstrated to us clearly that we would save at least an average of N$100 million per year if we let it be run by a logistics company,” he said.

The minister said monitoring systems were in place at the CMS, such as CCTV cameras for surveillance, but some officials put boxes in front of the cameras.

Another obstacle, he said, was the red tape at the Central Procurement Board, adding that tenders for critical supplies often die at the tender board for tedious reasons.

According to him, Namibia loses millions of dollars to competitors in the region because of this.

“You submit it to Central Procurement Board, it stays there. Then questions come back to you, ‘This is sentence needed to have a comma, but a comma is not there. This word must start with a capital letter, but it is starting with a small letter’. “Instead of saying, ‘Comrade, can you come over so we can sort out this document’. We are losing time and we lose out to competitors. If a German wants to invest here, suddenly Tanzania has better things, so they move,” Haufiku said.