The Kempton Park Hospital closed its doors in 1996 with millions of Rands worth of equipment locked inside.

Over the years, most of the equipment has either been stolen or destroyed.

There’s no electricity, the rooms are empty, the ceilings have been ripped out, there are broken windows and doors and thousands of confidential patient files litter the floors.

Every month, a security company is paid to look after this abandoned building with taxpayers’ money that some believe could be better used to help other hospitals in desperate need of equipment. We also know that for R50, you can pay the security to go on ghost tours of the hospital. There is a belief that this hospital is haunted.

To this day, there is still no clear explanation about why this hospital was closed. When I asked the MEC of Health and the MEC of Infrastructure, they simply refused to answer me.  The decision to close this hospital was a bad one. Cheap politics cannot be the order of the day when we are talking about the lives of South Africans. The objective of a government should be to save lives.

On the other side, we have Tembisa hospital which services both the residents of Kempton Park, Tembisa and surrounding areas. This hospital is simply struggling to cope. If you visit this hospital it is overcrowded, the sight of patients sleeping on the floor in the wards has become the norm. Maternity ward has an average of three nurses per shift delivering an average of fifty babies per day.

Naturally, one realises that the quality of healthcare is compromised under such pressure. Proper service delivery includes ensuring that people have access to proper healthcare.

On the other side of the N3 is Edenvale hospital. This is not the most accessible health facility to Kempton Park and Tembisa residents. Even if they access this facility, it is also under pressure. During a recent sight visit, they hospital staff indicated that they needed an additional two hundred beds in order to cope.

Good governance would have taken into consideration the population growth and anticipated the size of the Kempton Park population today. One doesn’t have to look very far but the waiting list in the public schools and the mushrooming of private schools are an indication of how fast Kempton Park is growing.

The Ekurhuleni municipality has proposed a township development not very far from here in Birchleigh. This development would bring additional pressure on Tembisa Hospital giving it further difficulty with coping.

Naturally, we the DA realise that by opening Kempton Park hospital, the supporting infrastructure such as roads, water and sewerage will have to be assessed to ensure that it can cope with the increasing traffic.

At the moment, the hospital grounds are not properly maintained, the grass rarely gets cut giving criminals a perfect hiding ground.

Opening Kempton Park Hospital would give the growing Kempton population access to health care where they already live.

This is part of the freedom that was fought for in 1994. It’s unfair that people should have to travel to Tembisa looking for a hospital when there is an abandoned hospital right here in Kempton Park.

The opening of the Kempton Park Hospital is an opportunity to reduce the strain on Tembisa Hospital and Edenvale Hospital.

In September 2012, the then MEC of Health Hope Papo promised that this hospital would be opened this year 2015. Last year, the same MEC promised to open the hospital in 2017.

This year, MEC Mahlangu then said she had plans to open the hospital as a district hospital.

As the DA, we will continue to appeal to the ANC to open this hospital to save our lives by saving our hospital.