Motsoaledi says Hawks barred suspended officials, questions full pay

Parliament’s health portfolio committee laid bare cascading governance failures threatening the country’s public health system on Thursday.

This included the arrest of three senior officials, a 30-hour laboratory blackout, and a regulatory body accused of misleading parliament.

On 2 March 2025, the director general of the National Department of Health, the deputy director general responsible for hospital and tertiary services and human resources, and the chief financial officer were arrested by the Hawks and appeared in the Pretoria General Court the same day.

They were each granted bail of R10 000.

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“The Hawks came to the department and presented me with a charge sheet on which it was written that they must never set foot in the department until their cases have been finalised,” Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi told the committee.

The minister confirmed he subsequently sought legal clarity on what the restriction meant, sending his legal adviser to the prosecutor’s office.

The prosecutor declined to put their interpretation in writing but stated verbally that, while other departmental officials required court permission to contact the suspended officials, the minister himself could still communicate with them.

Suspended officials on full pay

Motsoaledi further revealed that he had written to President Cyril Ramaphosa, requesting that the delegation suspend the director-general (DG).

“As you know, ministers cannot hire, suspend or fire director-generals. It’s a prerogative of the president, but the president can delegate,” he said.

That delegation arrived on Friday, 6 March, along with a presidential minute authorising the advertisement of the DG’s post.

Suspension letters for all three officials followed on 11 March, with Professor Nicholas Crisp appointed as acting director-general.

The committee pressed the minister on whether the internal disciplinary process and the criminal proceedings would remain separate.

Motsoaledi was clear that he “always knew them to be separate processes”. He cited his experience in the Department of Home Affairs, where officials were dismissed internally long before law enforcement concluded its work – and, in some cases, charges were never laid.

Regarding officials suspended on full pay, the minister acknowledged public frustration.

“Unfortunately, according to the laws of the country, when you put a person on precautionary suspension, it is always on full pay. I wish it were otherwise because I personally have always not been happy about this.”

NHLS system collapse triggered by power failures, not cyberattack

The National Health Laboratory Service appeared before the committee to account for a 30-hour system outage that began on the evening of 16 March 2025, causing its TrakCare laboratory information system to become inaccessible to laboratories and clinicians across the country.

NHLS CEO Professor Koleka Mlisana explained that the incident was infrastructure-related, not a repeat of the 2023 cyberattack.

“The downtime was caused by exceptional external power instability. It was not a system failure or a system neglect,” she told the committee. Mlisana reassured the members that patient data remained protected throughout.

The NHLS Chief Information Officer, Dr Sylvia Sathekge, provided a technical account, explaining that prolonged power outages in the Sandringham area of Johannesburg, where the NHLS headquarters are located, had caused repeated voltage fluctuations and switching between the municipal supply and generators.

“We’ve been getting continuous power outages recently, and this outlines the frequency of these problems,” she said.

These conditions corrupted a key database, forcing the institution to activate its disaster recovery environment.

The system was fully restored by 5am on 18 March, though a second brief hang lasting approximately 45 minutes occurred on the day of the committee meeting itself.

NHLS backup strategy

Sathekge said both primary and backup systems failed simultaneously because backups were scheduled to run at night during low-activity periods.

“On the day of the downtime, we could not just switch over because the backup site itself was not having the latest snapshot,” she said.

The NHLS said it had initiated two procurement processes to migrate its servers to an enterprise-grade hosted data centre, but both tenders received no responses.

The migration is now expected to take six to nine months following board approval. In the interim, the institution is pursuing solar augmentation, seeking a temporary generator loan from the City of Johannesburg, and exploring a 3-2-1 off-site backup strategy.

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