Hogan urged to lift restrictions

2008-10-09 16:34

Cape Town - The Democratic Alliance on Thursday urged Health Minister Barbara Hogan to lift restrictions imposed by her predecessor on the flow of information between her department and Parliament.

"The DA has written to new Health Minister Barbara Hogan to ask her to unblock the bottleneck created by Manto Tshabalala-Msimang in drawing up responses to Parliamentary questions, the party's spokesperson on health Mike Waters said in a statement.

The DA had not received a single reply on 37 questions which the party had submitted to the former health minister.

"One of the many difficulties of dealing with the health department under Dr Tshabalala-Msimang was her approach towards making information public which was more appropriate to a military junta than a modern democracy," Waters said.

Questions for which responses were still outstanding included one requesting the department to disclose measures being taken to deal with the shortage of nurses in the country, as well as one on the qualifications of hospital chief executives.

Parliamentary questions were an important component of any properly functioning democratic system as they were a means of obtaining important information that would not otherwise be made public, Waters said.

"The new minister has shown every indication so far of adopting a very different approach to her predecessor and we hope that she will be able to speed up the processes of responding to questions," he said.

- SAPA