The Real Cost of Public Holidays

We’ve all heard businesspeople complain about how public holidays cost their businesses a lot of money. Rather far-fetched a complaint if you have no idea how a business runs. 

Business people may count the cost in emalangeni and cents but for rural and poor folks, the cost in somewhere between life and death. Literally.

Let me break it down for you as I have firsthand experience of this, gained from the past few days of December 2015.

On Christmas day 2015, my almost 5year old son sliced his left leg just below the knee with glass. He was playing on the roof top of an old and stationary Mercedes Benz 200 that belonged to my father when the shattered windscreen left him seeing red.

He needed to be stitched, so we had to rush him to the emergency unit of the hospital nearest to our kaLanga home. The nearest hospital is about 25minutes drive away - in Siteki town.

Our first stop was at the over a year old government-owned regional hospital located around the Siteki Nazarene complex. Two eager beavers of security guards came trotting to us as if they were already aware of the nature of our emergency.

One had his pen and note book in hand when he met us at the closed gate – ready to register us into the premises, ready to register us, we presumed. But alas, he was only ready to notify us that the hospital was closed because it always is on public holidays. Incredible!

Can’t afford to ail

Next stop was inevitably good old Good Shepherd private’ Hospital. To be honest, I was a little relieved that this new government hospital was closed because I wasn’t 100 percent comfortable about going to a health facility whose track record I didn’t know.

Historically, Good Shepherd is renowned for its fair share of dark encounters with members of the ailing public, but over the past four years or so, in my observation at least, things seem to have continuously improved.

I remember when my son was only a year old; I was particularly impressed to find that this hospital now had a dedicated Children’s out-patient Unit – where children no longer had to join the often long queue with adults. 

In addition, I found that the attitudes of the staff had changed from the hostile and arrogant ‘I’m- a-nurse-and-you-are-a-clueless-dirty-illiterate-patient’ approach to friendly and professional.

Good Shepherd hospital file picture

Anyway, back to Christmas day 2015 - at Good Shepherd we were asked to pay E60.00 for what the hospital staff call ‘registration’. Quite steep considering I’m not used to paying at government hospitals and clinics in South Africa where my son and I stay.



So the lady behind the glass counter explained to me that E60.00 applies only on public holidays, weekends and after hours. Otherwise the weekday registration fee is E20.00 per adult and E10.00 for children between ages 0-12 years.

I overheard an old woman tell the nurse that the three ill children she had brought were also visiting South African residents – they had swallowed strange things that made them sick. I imagined they were also feeling the deficit created in their holiday budget after paying the E60.00 registration fee.

We were still to pay for medicines once the treatment was done. For my son, that amounted to a separate E75.00. Everything had to be paid for in cash. The cash payment was also sore for me because when I do go to private hospitals I use my medical insurance benefits and not cash.

I was told to come in daily for the next seven days to have my son’s stitches dressed and monitored. So this meant E60 each time I visited starting on Saturday December 26 through Sunday December 27. 

I got a headache instantly. Imagine the migraine I got when I learned that even Monday December 28 would be holiday in honor of the Incwala Dance?

Dances during the annual Incwala Ceremony 

Can’t afford to stay alive

Medical bills aside, it’s a real and painful financial cost to travel from my rural home to the end of Siteki every day. 

However, I quickly started to count my blessings when I remembered that the average person from my hood has to catch at least two public buses to get to this hospital especially on a public holiday when the government hospital is closed. That’s E40.00 per return trip.

Never mind the travel cost - the added strain for most rural folk is the scarcity of public transport on public holidays. 

Most people have to hire their neighbors’ vans or tractors… if they’re lucky. Often this is after walking for a few good kilometers to request this kind of transport for an emergency medical evacuation. 

So let’s not even talk about ambulances and getting hold of them in a place like ours where you sometimes have to climb a tree to get a good MTN signal even during 21 Days of Y’ello care.

It all probably sounds as far-fetched as a businessman’s complaint about public holidays does to a lay person but this is the reality for most of us kaLanga on an ordinary day. Even worse a reality on a public holiday and we had four of them back-to-back within the past week alone.

You should have seen how packed the Good Shepherd OPD unit was on Tuesday after the public holidays. This is how my rural folk try to beat the financial cost of staying alive – they hold their sickness in just so that they pay less on a normal week day. 

I don’t even want to think about what medical complications this could possibly create. It’s even easier for most to abandon the hospital visit and opt to consult with only the local herbalist.

I’m not as great as the legendary Ms. Phelele Fakudze at mathematics, but even I can calculate that the probability that a sick rural person will die on a public holiday or weekend in this country is higher than that of the umbutfo weeding the King’s fields at eMfabantfu today because it seems health care is not prioritized for all.