Former Gauteng Health Department Acting Chief Financial Officer Babita Deokaran. Image credit: Gauteng Health Department.
(The Post News) – Following the Special Investigating Unit’s (SIU) interim report, which disclosed that the corruption Babita Deokaran exposed at Tembisa Hospital had grown to a value of over R2 billion, her family has expressed shock and deep sorrow.
Following the discovery of almost R850 million in questionable hospital payments, Deokaran, a representative of the Gauteng Department of Health, was assassinated in August 2021. The suspected mastermind is still at large, despite the fact that six hitmen have been jailed for her murder.
Grief and Disappointment
The family‘s sorrow and rage have increased because it was discovered that the stolen money has more than doubled since Deokaran’s passing.
Bishop Tony Haripersadh, Deokaran’s brother-in-law, said, “The family is very saddened and hurt… it’s been four years and it’s still like the first day that we lost her.”
The fact that a large amount of the corruption, believed to be worth R1.2 billion, seems to have happened after her passing has left the family extremely dissatisfied. Haripersadh thinks that if authorities had taken action sooner regarding the data on her devices, this could have been avoided.
He implied that authorities may have found important hints sooner. “We are very disappointed and angry at the fact that she laid down her life, and all that she uncovered was stored on her laptop and cellphone,” he said.
A Roadmap to Justice
Babita’s younger brother, Rakesh Deokaran, called the SIU’s most recent discovery “extremely alarming,” referring to the R2 billion amount as “the scale of betrayal of the public trust” rather than merely a statistic.
He condemned the ongoing theft following the murder, saying it “confirms that those involved were emboldened by a culture of impunity, where whistle-blowers could be silenced and corruption could thrive without consequence.”
Rakesh stressed the need of using the SIU report as a “roadmap to justice.”
Reports are too frequently ignored as the guilty carry on as if nothing had occurred. Here, this must not be the case,” he insisted. “Punishing Babita’s killers is not enough to bring about justice for her… It implies that everyone involved in the SIU report, including politicians, private contractors, and public authorities, must be held accountable.
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