Note to Editors: Attached please find a soundbite in English here by Alan Fuchs MPL
Forty-one City of Johannesburg ambulances, valued at more than R16 million, have been standing idle for six years. Meanwhile, residents are subjected to a Gauteng provincial ambulance service that puts users at risk because of long waiting times.
The DA calls on the Gauteng MEC for Health, Faith Mazibuko, to conduct an immediate independent audit of all 41 ambulances, including their ownership, condition, current value, and repair costs. All provincialisation and asset-transfer agreements must be made public.
Within 60 days, every ambulance must either be repaired and deployed, transferred to Gauteng, allocated to another lawful public service, or sold. Taxpayers cannot continue paying for government incompetence and indecision.
These ambulances were bought to save lives. Instead, they have been standing unused at the City’s Emergency Medical Service (EMS) bases, losing value, and not benefiting the community. The root of this failure lies in Gauteng’s poorly managed provincialisation of ambulance services.
Although ambulance services are a provincial constitutional responsibility, municipalities previously operated them on behalf of the province. When Gauteng took the function back in 2020, it assumed responsibility for operations, personnel, and dispatch services, but failed to deal properly with the municipal ambulances left behind.
Six years later, the vehicles remain stranded.
Why was there no binding plan to transfer, maintain, sell, or deploy them? Who decided that assets worth millions could simply stand and deteriorate? Why has no official been held accountable?
The COJ no longer has the budget, skills, or equipment to run a fully-fledged ambulance service, but is currently negotiating with Gauteng province for an operating license that will allow it to run an event-based supplementary service. In light of Johannesburg’s well-publicised financial crisis, is this even possible?
An ambulance without paramedics, insurance, medicines, equipment, and a dispatch system is not an emergency service. It is an expensive parked vehicle.
Only the DA-led Gauteng Provincial Government will protect public assets, hold officials accountable and ensure that emergency resources are used to serve residents rather than left to rot behind locked gates.