Finance Minister Tito Mboweni has been challenged to apologise for his ‘outright lie’ about racial segregation at Tygerberg Hospital in his Medium Term Budget Policy Statement on Wednesday.
Western Cape MEC for health Dr Nomafrench Mbombo said Mboweni’s ‘blatant lie’ that there was racial segregation at Tygerberg was an insult to health workers and was clearly ‘meant to distract the public from the shocking R10.5 billion bailout to SAA’.
Mbombo said: ‘Tygerberg hospital and the exceptional frontline staff who work there serve the whole community, the province and the country. To claim that these dedicated men and women who have worked long, difficult shifts over a period of months to save lives, would stand for racial segregation in their wards is deeply insulting.’
Mboweni should ‘apologise for misleading the house’, she said.
Mbombo added: ‘This “Fake News” has one objective in mind: to distract from the ugly truth that the National Government is going to pour another R10.5 billion into the bailout of SAA. This multi-billion-rand flight of fancy will undermine the jobs, safety and wellbeing of millions of South Africans, and the Western Cape Government will have to help pick up the tab.’
[Picture: By Dfmalan, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4297898]