Hon Chair, Ministers that are here, Deputy Ministers and Members of Parliament, I greet you all. I greet you all in the name of Jesus. I want to thank the members of the committee because we worked very well. We tried to work very fast without compromising the quality of the Bill. We think that this is something that should have been done yesterday.
As has been said, this Bill is all about delegations to the head of department. I am going to lean towards begging you to make sure that you understand that this Bill is about improving service delivery. The statistics that tell us how many people have not received proper service delivery owing to a lack of delegations are actually the tip of the iceberg.
We want to lobby you to help us in making sure that this does not hamper the Department of Health financially. Firstly, there is diagnosing somebody who is mentally ill. Mental illness is a functional illness which has no organic nature to it. A diagnosis can be done by self-diagnosis. You see yourself and think, look, I have a problem, a mental problem. I need to see a doctor. However, most of the time we fear doing this because we think that uyahlanya [you are mad] - and you don't want to be told that.
The second way you could be diagnosed is when people tell you you look abnormal mentally, and ask you please to seek attention from somewhere. Even that depends on the person and the integrity of that particular person who is telling you that.
In fact, to most of us who have never had primary health care, the only thing we know about mental illnesses is that umuntu uyahlanya - that on is mad. That is all, when we talk about psychosis, whereas a lot of other people have a whole spectrum of diseases, like depression. To further prove this, and I am sure everybody would agree with me, there is no word for depression in the African languages. If anybody knows one, tell me.
The third way of diagnosing people who have mental illnesses occurs when somebody commits a serious crime. If you look at jails, you will find that 70% of the people who are in jail have mental illnesses. I am not saying that somebody who is in jail should not be taken to jail but rather be taken for treatment. I am not trying to say that. I am saying that somebody who is in jail usually has an undiagnosed mental illness, and when they have served their time in jail, their case should be considered and looked into so that they can be helped later on. I do not want people to misquote me in what I am saying, but you do ask yourself what makes people commit crimes. I think this is a minefield.
Why do people commit crimes? I think there are two things, mainly, that make people commit crimes. One is anger. The other is paranoia. I have to qualify this. It is normal to be angry. It is normal to be paranoid, but when the stimulus of that anger is not equal to the anger that you have shown, it then becomes abnormal. I want to go back and say the anger or the paranoia that normally comes is usually related to our mindset.
If you look at our mindset, we have two ways of thinking. One part is the conscious mind; the other part is the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is that area of our bodies that is out of our control. You cannot control the subconscious mind, but you can control your conscious mind. It is unfortunate that the subconscious mind is that area that keeps your past in an area that you cannot control yourself.
In fact, we are an angry nation - not all of us, but if you look at South Africans, they are very angry - and that anger comes from our past. Our past adds value to the fact that we have anger in our subconscious minds and we don't know where it comes from. That particular anger will not take 20 or 30 years to pass - it could take even longer. If you are so angry, the stimulus is such that you cannot control yourself and the things that you do are the things that land you in jail.
Now, all I am trying to say is that we come from a very difficult past where we had an intracountry war. By this I mean we were fighting with ourselves. On the one side they were saying, no, we have to look after our security in this particular country, because there are terrorists that are harming our security. On the other side, we were saying this is our country; we have the right to be in this country. Whether you had a gun or not, you were part of that, and that has remained in our subconscious mind.
So, when you become angry and you cannot control your anger, that is when you start doing certain things that you cannot control because of the subconscious mind. I shudder to think, even in Parliament, were we not to have this area, this no-man's-land, what would happen if we became angry and our subconscious mind got evoked. It is good to have this no-man's-land so that we cannot do so, because when you look at the emotions that arise, sometimes you think that there are some serious things that could happen.
In fact - you might not be aware of this - some of us, if you have ever heard the definition of a psychopath, because of our past, because of our family problems, have become psychopaths. A few of us are psychopaths! A psychopath is somebody who has no remorse, no empathy, no sense of responsibility, and is somebody who does not have a conscience. They can do anything. That is what is actually happening. It does not mean that those people should not be jailed, but after their jail term, they should be considered for therapy.
I must say, in thanking the members on the portfolio committee for fast- tracking this Bill and making sure with its quality that we pass it, and in begging you to pass it, we must understand that it is all about delegations of the head of department - to delegate to a suitable person to make sure that service delivery takes place. Obviously, the statistics we are seeing of people that need these delegations are far less than the numbers we have in South Africa.
We have people with mental illnesses who end up in jail, who need therapy while they are in jail. There are more psychiatric problems that are obvious, and there are more people that commit crime. As I said, 70% of the people in jail need psychotherapy, not that they do not need to be taken to jail. We need to go beyond jailing people. We need to try to make sure that, as this august House, we go around and make sure we prevent this from happening, in understanding what makes some of the people go to jail. I think it is understandable that we are supposed to be angry; we have a right to be angry. However, that anger must equal the stimulus that has caused it. Sometimes, however, you see that the anger is beyond the stimulus; it is not proportional to the stimulus.
Let us make sure that we try to pick up people early before we see them committing crimes that are very serious. I think what we need to understand - all of us - is that the window is broken, and if the window is broken, the draught that comes in makes us all catch the flu.
Rather than asking questions about whether the window was broken from the inside or the outside - we should not be asking those questions - what we should be doing is making sure that we repair the window and making sure that we move together. I thank you. [Applause.]